


A Choice to Make

by scorbusfics



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Red Robin (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Attempt at Humor, Bat Family, Canon-Typical Violence, Comic Book Science, Dimension Travel, Gen, Gods, Hurt Tim Drake, Magic, Monsters, Tim Drake-centric, rated for language
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-16
Updated: 2019-03-14
Packaged: 2019-03-19 15:38:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 27,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13707465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorbusfics/pseuds/scorbusfics
Summary: They have to choose. Dick and Bruce have to choose one person each to save, and one to disappear through the door.“Send one of us,” Dick says fiercely, not for the first time. His face is dark and angry and desperate, eyes flicking from brother to brother. “Send one of us instead. I won’t choose.”“Neither will I,” Bruce says.But Tim knows.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It's not actually half as angsty as the tags and summary make it sound. Just hope you all enjoy it!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Because it _is_ his family. They may not show it very well, but they do love each other, in strange complicated ways. It’s all Tim has, some days.

Tim hasn’t got an ounce of strength left inside of him. He should; he’s Red Robin, and before that he was Robin, and before that he was Tim fucking Drake, and he _should_ be strong. But Dick’s face is ashen and Bruce is tight-lipped, eyes fixed on Jason’s unconscious form, and Damien is hazy and half-awake, and everything’s fucked, basically. 

The villain standing in the middle of the warehouse is the only one who looks pleased. He’s a new villain, one that Tim doesn’t recognise, and he hadn’t bothered with a monologue, surprisingly, so nobody knows his name. 

The etchings on the far wall begin to glow blue. Tim tries very hard not to move, to steady his breathing so that it looks like he’s unconscious while he peers through his eyelashes at Dick’s face. He doesn’t know if it works - if Batman notices his flickering eyes, if Nightwing knows that he can hear them, but he has to try. He won’t make this decision any harder than it has to be by being awake when they choose.

Because they have to choose. Dick and Bruce have to choose one person each to save, and one to disappear through the door. There’s something on the other side that the villain wants, but the dangers are clear, clear enough that he won’t risk it himself. The matter is delicate, apparently, and he doesn’t have time to waste. 

“Send one of us,” Dick says, not for the first time. His face is dark and angry, fierce eyes flickering from brother to brother. “Send one of us instead. I won’t choose.”

“Neither will I,” Bruce says, his voice all gravel and grit. But Tim knows. 

They won’t send Jason. They lost him once, both of them, and they won’t lose him again. No matter what he’s done or what he’s going to do, no matter his morals, it’s pretty clear that they love him, and they won’t risk losing him. 

Damian is young, still just a child, for all he’s seen and done. Damian - as he often reminds Tim - is Bruce’s blood son, and therefore more important. He’s Dick’s youngest brother, his Robin. Dick’s proven before that he will choose Damian over him, and Tim’s made his peace with that. The fences are mostly mended, although things will never be the same as they were before. He agrees, in part, with what Dick did. He just doesn't like how it happened. 

“The clock is ticking,” the villain says. Tim wants to punch him, but the place is rigged, and only he knows how to get out of there. That’s the deal, apparently. Send one boy through the wall to fetch his treasure, and the others get to walk free. Don’t choose, and they all die. Tim has no doubts that Bruce and Dick would be kicking the living shit out of the villain if they could move, but they’re currently held flat against the wall by some kind of blue forcefield. 

“Why won’t you send us through?” Dick snarls. 

The villain grins a little. “This way is more fun.”

Tim is chained to the ground, but the cuffs around his wrists are leather, and he can work out of them easily enough. He needs a plan. He always has a plan, but so far, the only thing he can think of is basically suicide. He glances sideways while Dick snaps and snarls at the villain, and catches sight of Damian. He’s mouthing something - _Grayson_ \- and behind him, Jason stirs on the ground, his head wound bleeding stickily. Tim’s heart clenches painfully. 

If they send either one of them through, regardless of who chooses who, then they’re going to be dead meat within a minute. They’re in no shape to fight, but Tim is relatively unharmed. He’s unharmed, and his head is clear, and he already knows how this is going to go down. 

He doesn’t particularly want to go through the big, glowing wall to his death. 

So he supposes he’ll just have to live, come back, and kick the villains’ ass.

He’s up and moving within seconds of his decision, the cuffs cast aside. He doesn’t have a weapon, so charging the villain - God, the guy really needs a name or something - would be pointless, but he wants to get a good kick to the teeth in there anyway. There are no restraints besides the cuffs, which is a mistake, but the villain is still armed, and he has magic on his side. 

Dick shouts something, and the villain whips around, but Tim is already sprinting for the blue wall. It looks like runes, all sketched into the grey brick, and the blue glow starts to solidify as Tim draws closer. It’s like looking at a bright tunnel with no end. 

The villain starts shouting as well, and Tim has to hope, pray, that he won’t just kill everyone anyway once Tim’s disappeared. He doesn’t think that will happen. All he has to do is get through the wall, find whatever it is the man wants - he has a rough description from the way he babbled about it - and then come back through. Then he can hold it hostage until his family is released. 

Because it _is_ his family. They may not show it very well, but they do love each other, in strange complicated ways. It’s all Tim has, some days. Even though he knows what the choice would have been, when Dick and Bruce finally gave in, it doesn’t mean he hates them. Maybe he feels a little hollow, but he still loves them. 

Or he wouldn’t be going through with this shitty, awful plan. 

The blue light encases him, and the last thing he sees before he’s thrown forward is Dick’s horrified face, and Bruce’s wide eyes. 

And then it’s nothing but air hitting his face and a squeezing sensation all over his body, and he’s weightless and flying and it feels like he might not ever stop. 

And then he _does_ stop, slamming into the hard-packed ground, landing on his back with his arms and legs splayed, a tangled, breathless heap. He feels like an overturned beetle that just narrowly escaped being stepped on. 

His eyes ache with the weight of the bright, piercing sun above him. The air tastes tangy and tart, but he breathes in deep gulps of it anyway, trying to settle his lungs. It’s oddly quiet, but he can hear the wind. 

After a few moments, he sits up slowly, grains of dirt shifting beneath his tattered clothes. He’d been caught out of uniform, so he’s just wearing old jeans and a shirt that used to belong to Dick, but even that feels too heavy here; it’s hot and sticky, which Tim has never liked.

He takes shallow breaths as he surveys the area. A massive cliff sits directly opposite him, presumably where Tim was flung from, or through, if the etchings on the cliff face are any indication. The ground is hard and covered in dust and dirt, and there’s no sign of any life for miles around. It’s still, quiet. Rocky formations pop out of the ground here and there, but there’s no greenery, no water, and no civilisation. It’s almost like a desert, but not quite. 

He swallows thickly and stands on shaky knees. He has to get back, he thinks, because the others may not have much time, but there’s nothing here that looks like the treasure the villain wanted - an orb, apparently, made of lapis lazuli, hidden deep within a tomb and blessed with the powers of the Old Gods. 

If such a thing exists, then it doesn’t exist here. There’s no tomb, no opening in the ground, no great big glowing neon sign proclaiming that _the orb is this way, dear sir, and won’t you sit down and rest awhile? You look like you’ve had a long day._

Tim turns tiredly, just in case he missed such a sign, and when he turns back to the cliff - he stops. Stares. 

The etchings are gone. The blue glow has faded completely, and there’s nothing but smooth rock left behind. Tim lurches forward, heart in his throat, and curses under his breath, and then louder as his fingers scramble over the cliff face. There’s nothing there. Nothing there at all. No doorway, no strange blue tunnel. 

No way home. 

Tim stares for a moment or two, and then he drops roughly to the ground. 

"Shitty, awful plan."


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Six months is a long time, but they haven’t given up hope. Dick can’t give up on Tim, not after everything that’s happened between them. That’s his little brother, sent God knows where, and Dick isn’t going to rest until he gets him back. Cass and Steph are out on patrol right now, keeping Gotham safe while Bruce searches for answers. Babs has every single system running constantly. Jason and Damian are riddled with guilt and strange grief, although they’ll never admit it. 
> 
> Bruce will never stop, Dick knows, because Tim never stopped looking for him. And Tim isn’t dead, just gone. Missing. Misplaced.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! Such lovely response to the last chapter that I churned this one out early. Hope you enjoy it, and thank you so much!

The Cave is quiet. Alfred is pottering around in the background, tidying up the medical area, with Damian assisting him between muttered complaints. His scowl is rather pronounced, but he does as Alfred says. Dick watches him fondly from his seat near the desk, twisted ankle propped up on another chair. On the other side of the Cave, Jason and Bruce are pouring over old maps and case files with intense expressions. 

Dick smiles sadly. If there’s one thing to be said about Tim’s disappearance, it’s that it’s brought them closer together. Jason is still on edge around them, a little, but he’ll talk to Bruce without every discussion devolving into a screaming row. He ruffles Damian’s hair and laughs when Damian hisses threats in his direction. He lets Dick sling an arm over his shoulder begrudgingly. He’s closer to Alfred than he is to the rest of them, and Dick likes seeing them converse more than anything else, likes seeing the way Jason’s face lights up and he shuffles in place awkwardly, like a small boy again, trapped in layers of bulk. 

It’s good, but it still sucks in some ways, because Tim had to disappear for it to happen. Tim is _gone._ There’s a gap in their lives where a still-too-young, tired, coffee-stained boy should be, and Dick doesn’t know how to get him back. None of them do. 

It’s been six months since Tim ran through the blue door. The man holding them all had been so shocked by what Tim did that his grip on his magic had slipped, and Bruce had knocked him out before he could get it back. 

Six months is a long time, but they haven’t given up hope. Dick can’t give up on Tim, not after everything that’s happened between them. That’s his little brother, sent God knows where, and Dick isn’t going to rest until he gets him back. Dick rotates his ankle gently, sighing. Cass and Steph are out on patrol right now, keeping Gotham safe while Bruce searches for answers. Babs has every single system running constantly. Jason and Damian are riddled with guilt and strange grief, although they’ll never admit it. 

Bruce will never stop, Dick knows, because Tim never stopped looking for him when they thought he was dead. And Tim isn’t dead, just gone. Missing. Misplaced. 

The man who sent him through the door - Jason has referred to him exclusively as Asshead for weeks now - is in prison, and no amount of interrogation will get anything out of him. Not his name, not what he wants, or where Tim’s gone. Dick suspects that he doesn’t actually know where Tim’s gone. 

Nobody does. Zatanna has examined the remains of the blue door at length, only to grimly inform them that it’s not magic of this world. Which means that Tim isn’t on earth, which means that there’s a billion possibilities surrounding his location. 

A hand drops down on his shoulder, and Alfred’s tone is stern but kind. “You need to sleep, Master Richard. Your ankle needs rest if you are to venture out again tomorrow night.”

Dick drops his head back with a tired sigh and grins, slightly lopsided, up at Alfred. “No rest for the wicked, Alfred. Not when there’s so much to do.”

Alfred’s voice softens. “Master Timothy will be harder to bring home if you work yourselves to death.”

An alert pings on the computer, and Bruce strides across the Cave towards it. Dick catches Jason’s eye, and he shrugs, putting down the file in front of him. Dick climbs up off the chair, careful not to put too much weight on his foot, and comes up behind Bruce, who barely blinks. He’s staring hard at the screen. 

“The man who sent Tim through the door has escaped his cell,” Bruce says. 

“Oh, has he? How unfortunate.”

Bruce has the smirking villain pinned against the wall in three quick steps. Dick stares at him, shocked; he didn’t hear him arrive, or see him come in. He grimaces when he spots the blue glow around the man’s hands. It’s faint, from the magic-binding that was done while he was unconscious, but there must still be enough there to get him where he wants to be. 

He doesn’t appear to have enough to fight back, though, which makes it easy for Bruce to restrain him, tying him to a chair. 

“There’s no need to be so rough,” the man says. “I came to find you, after all. I’m sure you want your boy back, don’t you?”

Dick stills, glancing first at Bruce, and then at Jason. The guns are firmly kept away in the locker when Jason’s in the cave, but Dick can see his hands twitch. Rubber bullets are still painful enough to cause some serious damage. 

“What do you know?” Bruce growls, and he’s not Bruce anymore, he’s the Bat. “Where is Red Robin?”

“No need to bother with formalities, now. I took him in his civilian clothes, after all. I know his name is Tim. I know all of your identities.”

Dick wants to wipe the smug grin off his face. He fists his hands and steps forward slowly, and the man slips his eyes towards him. 

“Ah, Nightwing. Dick Grayson. Tell me, did you expect him to do what he did? Because that wasn’t something I had foreseen, unfortunately. But he used to be your brother, didn’t he? Surely you knew what he’d do.”

“He still is,” Dick says lowly. “Where is he?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” the man says, with no small amount of bitterness. “He ran through before I could arrange the runes properly, so he could be anywhere. I’m almost certain he’s in the dimension I wanted him to land in, but I have no idea where on the planet he landed.”

“Why are you here?” Bruce says, looming over him. 

“I still want that artifact,” the man explains simply. “It’s extraordinarily powerful. And I want my magic unbound. The only way to get both of these things is to work with you, to return your boy to you. If he’s still alive, of course. If not, we’re all in a bit of a pickle.”

A small figure leaps past Dick, who throws an arm out and catches Damian before he can render the man’s head from his shoulders. The villain has the audacity to laugh. 

“Grayson, allow me to stab him,” Damian seethes.

“We need him to find Tim,” Dick says, and he waits for Damian to go limp before he lets go. 

“Trust me, Demon, I want to kill him as badly as you do,” Jason says, reaching over to clap Damian on the shoulder. “We should see what he has to offer first, though.”

The last is said menacingly enough that the man starts to speak hastily. 

“I can trace him,” the man says. “I have enough magic to trace him and show you where he is. It may take the magic a while to catch up to him. We may see where he’s been, and what he’s done, rather than where he is, and what he’s doing. But eventually we will see him as he is now, and we may be able to glean his location."

There is silence for a few moments, and then Bruce grunts. He stands up straight and beckons them away from the man. Alfred is the one to stand guard over him, and for the first time, the man actually looks a little wary. Dick grins. He can’t really blame the guy; Alfred can be imposing when he wants to be. 

“I don’t like this,” Dick says, when they’re huddled at one end of the Cave. 

“Doesn’t look like we have much of a choice,” Jason says, shrugging. He looks unnerved though, his expression grim. “We need to know where to look, and this guy can help, and we don’t have any other leads. We need somewhere to start.”

“This may be our only chance,” Damian adds. “I do not like it, but if he withdraws his help, then we truly are at a loss. Unless you wish to bring others into this.”

Bruce doesn’t reply. It’s been tossed around, the idea of calling Ra’s, but Dick knows that Bruce won’t go for it. This is their best shot, for the moment. Their only shot. 

“Call the girls back in,” Bruce says eventually. “We’ll wait until they get here, and then try this.”

He stalks back to the center of the Cave, and Dick reaches for the comm. 

“You know, he could really do with a name,” Dick says idly, as they walk back towards the man.

Jason hums. “Don’t see what’s wrong with Asshead, personally, but alright.”

The man glowers at him. Jason sizes him up. 

“We’ll call you Bob. Bob the Villain.”

A short pause greets his words, and Jason looks at them all, defensive. “What? I knew a Bob once. Biggest pain in the ass I’ve ever known.”

Damian scoffs. Bob the Villain doesn’t look particularly taken with the name. 

It takes twenty minutes for the girls to arrive, twenty minutes spent in tense silence. Steph demands an explanation as soon as she spots Bob the Villain, and Cass stares at him silently until he shifts in discomfort. Dick wraps her in a quick hug - he knows she misses Tim. The two had always had a strong connection, a subtle way of understanding each other. Cass hugs him back carefully, and then steps away. 

"What is happening?"

It doesn’t take long to explain everything, and by then, everything’s set up. A single rune drawn on the wall in chalk, scrounged up by Alfred. Bob the Villain is dragged closer on his chair, teeth gritted, and then the magic starts. 

They gather together, huddled around the far wall. The rock begins to glow, and pictures appear on the surface. Dick tugs Damian closer, and Jason stands rigidly beside them. Bruce leans in, and Alfred watches from behind them all. Cass stands with him, and Steph is practically vibrating in the chair she’s pulled up. The silence is thick with anticipation. 

“There will be no sound,” Bob the Villain warns them. “And you may not like what you see.”

The pictures start off grimy and unfocused, and then suddenly, Tim is there. Dick feels his heart clench at the sight of him. Printed on the wall in vivid colour, moving and shouting and waving his arms around. It’s like looking through a window into another world, which Dick supposes is exactly what they’re doing, and then the rest of the image catches up to him, and he forgets all about that. 

Tim is drenched in blood. Soaked in it, covered from head to toe. 

Dick inhales sharply, mouth growing taut. Steph makes an involuntary noise in the back of her throat. Dick can’t look away.

“Jesus,” Jason mutters. 

Tim is nowhere recognisable. He’s standing in darkness, and things are flying down from the crooked ceiling and batting at his face, sharp teeth and claws dragging against his skin. He’s holding an old-fashioned torch in one hand, a burning stick, and the creatures dart away when the fire draws close to them. 

He’d had no weapon, Dick remembers, when he went through the blue door. 

Tim keeps moving forward, and by the looks of it he’s in some sort of cavern, the air dark and musty, the ground uneven. Dick watches as he stumbles forward, uncharacteristically clumsy, and his heart clenches as Tim staggers towards the edge of a chasm, deep underground. He can see fire and wisps of energy floating above it, and it looks like it goes on for miles. 

“What the fuck is he doing?” Jason says, as Tim starts to shout. There’s no sound through the pictures, and his face is half-turned away, so Dick can’t read his lips, but he’s clearly shouting, _bellowing_. 

Just when Dick thinks that nothing’s going to happen, darkness begins to creep out of the chasm. 

A hand of ash, the size of an old oak, reaches up out of the fire and grips Tim tightly around the middle and lifts him. Dick straightens up, staring in horror as the hand lifts Tim out of sight. There’s a gasp from his right. Bruce is pale, his jaw tight, his eyes devastated. Jason grips Dick’s arm as Tim disappears. 

The picture fades away. 

“What was that?” Steph whispers, licking her lips. She looks deathly afraid. Cass moves forward and places a hand on her shoulder, shaken, and Alfred follows, looking grim. “What was that?”

“How long ago was that?” Bruce demands, turning to face the man tied to the chair. 

“Four months after he was sent through,” Bob the Villain says, voice calm and serene. “There’s more. Much more.”

Dick isn’t sure he wants to see any more. Not if there’s a similar theme. But he drifts closer to the wall anyway, and Damian follows, for his own comfort or Dick’s, he’s not sure. 

“Show us,” Bruce says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much! Please leave a comment/kudos if you enjoyed it, and let me know what you thought. Ta!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I am rarely dishonest,” Tim lies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back to Tim. This is the start of his journey on the other side of the blue door, takes place three months after he arrives there, before the ash hand grabs him. It's just to give you an idea of what Tim's facing. This story will go back and forth between times and POV's, but I'll always try to be very clear about when/where/who etc. And I'll always put it in the notes just in case!
> 
> Thank you so much for the lovely response to the last chapter, I really appreciate all your comments. I hope you like this one!

Tim has never been one to give up, give in. It’s not in his nature. 

That’s why, three months down the line, he still makes the trip at the end of each week, to the cliff-face, to see if the blue door is back. It’s a portal, as the people of this world call it, a portal which opens a pathway between worlds and can spit out and suck in anything it pleases. But you can only pass through when a portal on the other side is open too. 

Which begs the question, of course, as to what the fuck happened to him. 

He’s pretty sure that he was never supposed to land here. Portals, as he learned from the Scroll-Master and the History-Keeper, each visited the previous month, need to be fine-tuned. They open once in a blue moon, on their own, and he thinks that’s what happened; the Villain, who Tim has taken to calling Dave in his head, knew that the portal would be opening on the other side, on it’s own, that day, and he made sure to open the portal on his end with his own magic. That way there didn’t have to be anybody on the other side. 

But he forgot to fine-tune the runes, and Tim was left stranded in the asscrack of nowhere. 

Dave the villain is a bit of a dick, and if Tim thinks about him too long, he wants to reach through time and space and pummel the guy. 

He’s thinking about it now, as he stares at the blank cliff-face. The portal isn’t open, isn’t even here. It’s probably on some other end of the land, right now, but no Tim can’t bring himself to go chasing after their whereabouts, not when there’s a possibility that someone might come looking for him here, that the portal might reopen here. 

There’s no guarantee, the Mage in the village had warned him, that he would land back in his world if he went through. He could end up stranded on an entirely different world, or stuck in the vast recesses of space, alone in the dark. 

Tim thinks that he doesn’t really care. If there’s a chance, however small, that the portal could lead him home, he would take it.

“That’s the reckless part of you we was talkin’ about the other night,” says a voice from behind him, and Tim doesn’t turn. He knows he’ll see a gaggle of other people, people who will invite him to camp with them tonight, like they do most nights. They don’t fit in the cosy village on the outskirts of the DeadLands either - they only venture in for drink and jobs. Food can be found outside, and the company is far better too. 

“You know I don’t like it when you read my mind,” Tim says, switching tongues effortlessly. He’d picked up a spell for a few coin near the Scroll-Master’s market, one that let him pick up the language pretty quickly - only a fare few spoke English here, and they wouldn’t tell him how or why they learned it. He’d had to learn theirs instead. 

“Don’t leave it so open, then,” says the voice again, clapping a hand down on his shoulder and steering him away. She’s a cheerful girl, just a tad younger than Tim, with long green hair and dragon blood, called Catus. Avrin, the Mage behind her, nods at Tim as he’s dragged past them, and Brimmet, the tall lady Necromancer, rolls her eyes at him in commiseration as Catus chatters his ear off. 

They’re a strange bunch. He doesn’t really know them all that well. He knows Catus has dragon blood because he’s seen her spew fire at beasts that crawl into their camp. He knows Avrin is built like a mountain and can handle almost any weapon thrown at him, but prefers to practice his healing magic. He knows next to nothing about Brimmet, other than that she’s good in a fight and doesn’t speak much, but makes excellent broth and will insist that Tim eats more than his fair share. She thinks he’s skinny and bound to get used as a toothpick one day, and she’s not afraid to scowl and say so. 

“We don’t understand why you’re looking for a way through that thing,” Catus says, as they trudge towards the woods on the other side of the plain. “But if that’s what you want, then we’re going to help.”

“Why?” Tim asks, suspicious. Years of working with Batman will do that to a guy. 

“You look sad,” Brimmet says. “You miss home.”

Tim doesn’t have an answer for that. 

“You don’t wanna leave this area, just in case, and that’s fine,” Catus says. “We found someone nearby, at the edge of the woods, who might tell you what you need to know. But she ain’t gonna talk to you if you look like that. Only the high-borns get to go near her.”

“That must mean she’s good at her job,” Avrin chimes in, and Catus nods, like he’s said something profound. Brimmet rolls her eyes again. 

“How exactly do I start to look the part, then?” Tim asks. He’s not sure this is going to work, and he’s a little wary, but there are things he needs to know, questions he needs answering.

Avrin holds up a bundle of leather with a grin. Inside, when Tim peers in, is a crinkled suit and something that looks like it could have been a pair of fancy shoes, once upon a time. 

“We robbed a guy,” Catus says proudly. “Now, go get changed. I didn’t almost get stabbed for nothin’, you know.”

*

Incense burns in the background. The scent clings to the seams of his grey suit like smoke. Tim amuses himself by glancing at the walls, which are heavily decorated with intricately sewn tapestries and photographs encased in ornate black frames. You cannot tell just by looking at him, that he’s a desperate man. He’s impeccably dressed, down to each highly polished shoe. His dark hair has been artfully styled and he remains pale and poised on his chair, the epitome of patient.

The woman shuffles the cards one last time. They’re large cards, a little too big for her hands, although she handles them with a practiced ease. The backs are soft and velvety, but the pictures shine glossily. 

Lady Lydia shuts her eyes briefly before she spreads the cards out in a fan on the table. Tim glances at them once before he looks up at the woman’s face. It’s partly obscured by a thin black veil, revealing just her mouth and pale, creamy skin. She wears her smile like a well-fitting glove. Plum lipstick decorates her full lips, which are twisted into an amused smile. A black, beaded shawl hangs from her bare shoulders. Tim smiles back politely.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing here. He doesn’t really believe in all this stuff, but anything is worth a try, and he’s been trying to keep an open mind lately. 

“Usually, I insist that the customer shuffles the cards,” the woman says. Lady Lydia, she’s called, although Tim doubts it’s her real name, the one her parents gave her. By the looks of the newspaper article that’s imprisoned in a remarkably plain frame on the brick wall, this woman has never known her parents, let alone known what they might have christened her. Lydia suits her, though.

“It helps to focus the session,” Lady Lydia continues. She has a beautiful, husky voice. “The client holds their question in their mind, and then the cards decide on their answer.”

“That doesn’t sound very scientific,” Tim says. He crosses his legs at the ankles and glances briefly at the clock nearby. The hands remain still. “In fact, it sounds rather ridiculous, if I’m honest.”

There is something strange about this place, something not of this land. The clock, the frames, the newspaper; all of it seems to come from another era, and Tim doesn't quite understand it. He hates not understanding things. 

Lady Lydia tilts her head to the side. “Are you often honest, Master Drake?”

“I am rarely dishonest,” Tim lies, because he needs this woman to trust him, work with him. “I find it dishonourable.”

“You must not have many friends,” Lady Lydia observes.

“On the contrary,” Tim says, shaking his head slightly. “I have a number of dear friends. But as interesting as this conversation is, I find myself diverting from the point of this little visit. As even a person with as little skill as you can tell, I am firmly a sceptic.”

He’s picked up her way of speaking well enough. It reminds him of schmoozing all the high-ups back home, at parties and charity balls and meetings. He hopes he looks the part of a royal, a high-born, as they’re called here. A Lord, at least. 

“That was made pretty evident when you snorted at my crystal ball,” Lady Lydia confirms. She doesn’t sound bothered, or offended. If anything, she sounds rather amused.

Tim snorts again. “I have seen real crystal before, and that is not it.”

“And I have seen real sceptics before,” Lydia says. Her voice cuts over him, despite staying as soft as silk. “Their scepticism is tempered only by their arrogant belief that they are the only intelligent creatures to grace this planet. Many of them creep through my door, searching for something that they don’t want me to find. They want their existence affirmed, their palms read, their future told. They want to put me in my place. They watch me, waiting eagerly for the moment when I slip and swallow my own tongue.”

She leans forward over the table. Her dress slips down a little, revealing a little more skin than is necessary. Tim averts his eyes. She runs her finger-tips over the velvet-backed cards that lay in wait on the table, poised.

“And I suppose I have done none of those things?” Tim asks, still looking away. The answer is obvious. “I suppose you think I am not a sceptic?”

“I think you are a man of science,” Lady Lydia says succinctly. “I think that the world is changing, but not fast enough for the both of us. I think there are creatures that crawl in the darkness, monsters that snarl in the silence. I think that you are on the edge of that darkness, peering in, waiting for one clawed hand to reach out and pull you down. That way, you can claim that it swallowed you up. You can lie and say that you weren’t hungry for it, that you didn’t go looking for trouble.”

Tim looks away. 

Her voice softens. “I think that you feel guilty. You’re supposed to be finding a way home, but there is wonder here. And opportunity, too, to be something more than you were at home. I think you miss your family, but you doubt that they miss you, and that makes you want to stay.”

Lady Lydia flips one of the cards over and pushes it towards him across the well-scrubbed surface. Swallowing back his unease, Tim carefully picks the card up by the corners. Painted on the front, in swathes of black and blue, is a large wolf with a bloody, crimson mouth and eyes that shine like blue starlight.

“I think that this is your card.”

Tim places the card back on the table. The wolf watches him, the way it always does. Tim watches it back, and then he looks up at Lady Lydia.

“And I think that you are more than a psychic,” Tim says, voice hoarse.

Her smile transforms into a smirk. She carefully lifts the veil, revealing rouged cheeks and startlingly red ringlets. She has skin like porcelain. She leans back in her chair and observes him.

“Tell me about the wolf,” she says. It’s not a request. Tim swallows around the lump in his throat. It’s not fear that swims in his veins, but anticipation, the hungry satisfaction that comes with being one step closer to an answer. Tim loves a puzzle, and this one is particularly intriguing. It distracts him, too, from the deeper questions, the troubles waiting for him when he returns to the cliff. 

“It haunts my dreams.” Tim licks his dry lips. “Or rather, it haunts my dream. Just the one dream, always the same one. It always begins in the same way. I’m in the forest, the one just outside of this village. It’s dark. I don’t know if I’m lost or not, but the only light comes from the moon. And it always ends the same way too, with the wolf creeping out from the trees and howling at the moon.”

Lady Lydia tilts her head, as if she’s waiting for more. And there is more to tell, but Tim doesn’t know if he can force the words out. 

The wolf isn’t just in his dreams. He’s been seeing it since the second week here, always on his peripheral. He knows it’s there, even when he can’t see it. It’s like it’s waiting for something, and Tim doesn’t know what. 

He swallows again, and ignores the way that Lydia’s eyes flick down to his throat. An intelligence lurks behind her eyes, masked by thick mascara and a sultry look, but it’s the intelligence that Tim needs.

“Under any other circumstance, I would be able to ignore it,” Tim says, brushing invisible lint from his trousers. “It’s just a dream, after all.”

“Sometimes, dreams are just dreams,” Lady Lydia says softly. “They can be more, a representation of an emotion or a memory, something you’ve either repressed or ignored. Almost always, though, they are simply what you see.”

Tim flaps a hand at her. “I know all of that. I’m out of options, now.”

Lady Lydia arches one thin eyebrow. “And so you’ve come to see the psychic.”

“Or something,” Tim says. He licks his lips again. They’re beginning to crack in the dry heat. “But not about the dream. I already know that the dream is just the dream, but the wolf feels like something else. It feels like more than a dream.” 

The clock on the wall begins to tick, abruptly, as if it had been waiting for those specific words.

“Or something,” Lady Lydia agrees, amused. “Psychic isn’t quite the right word.” Her fingers twitch, and quick as a flash, the cards are stacked in a neat little pile at her elbow. Tim blinks at them, and then glances sharply up at Lady Lydia. She stares back steadily. The silence begins to grow weighty, laden with heavy mystery. 

“I like you, Tim,” Lady Lydia says, out of nowhere. “Well, I like you just enough. And I can tell that you’re a desperate man, so I’m going to make a small exception. Keep in mind that should you divulge who allowed this exception to anyone, there will be severe consequences.”

Tim doesn’t get a chance to reply.

“Four truths,” Lady Lydia says, her voice taking on a brisk quality. “I will tell you four truths, and then you have to leave. You must promise me that you will leave, immediately.”

Once, Tim would have waited. He would have weighed every option, formed several plans, examined each possible problem. But it’s been months. 

Now, he barely hesitates. Instead, he nods frantically, hands gripping tightly at each other. Lady Lydia takes three cards off of the pile and slaps them on the table top in quick succession.

“The first truth is already in your hand. Now, ask me for the second.”

“Will I ever get home?” Tim blurts. He thinks of Bruce and Dick and Alfred, Steph and Cass, Kon and Bart and Cassie, Jason and Damian. He thinks of his lonely house, and the Manor, and the Cave, and the Tower. He thinks of Alfred’s cooking and hot showers and the hard grit of Gotham’s rooftops under his feet. 

“Home is a strange thing,” Lady Lydia says gently. “You will get there, in the end, but it may not be what you remember, and you may not expect the way.”

Tim doesn’t like the sound of that. He files it away to examine later, and presses on. 

“Where will the portal open?” 

“Not here,” she says immediately. “It’s okay to move, to leave. It will find you when it’s time. That was the third truth. Now, here is the fourth truth; how to survive it.”

Tim blinks at her. “Survive what?”

“This world. This change.” She pauses.

“The fourth truth is how to survive it,” she repeats, slower. “Be as far from human as possible. Be the thing that lurks beneath the bed, be the words that kiss the insides of people’s skulls, be the feeling that crawls over shivering skin. Don’t be human. Be brave. Don’t be afraid to change into something new. There really is wonder here.”

Abruptly, Lady Lydia stands up. She backs away from the table and sweeps an arm to the side. Tim blinks at her, his mouth dry. He wants to argue, to haggle for more specifics, but there’s an edge to her that he didn’t like. Something sharp, something deadly. Or something, she had said. Tim isn’t sure that he wants to know what that something is.

Numbly, he stands up and allows himself to be ushered from the room. He steps out of the crooked house and blinks in the harsh light of the sun. He’s about to leave when a thought occurs to him, and he whips around in time to place his foot in the door.

Lady Lydia glares at him. “You promised me that you would leave immediately. Don’t be human. Don’t break your promises.”

“You promised me that I would have four truths,” Tim says. He spreads his empty palms out in front of him. “The first is already in my hands, you said. There’s nothing in my hands.”

For a moment, Lady Lydia hesitates. Then, she slips something out of the pocket of her dress and places it in his waiting hands. Tim blinks down at the card in shock, and the wolf blinks back. He hadn’t put the card back in the pile, and Lady Lydia hadn’t picked it up either, as far as he had seen.

“This is my truth?” he asks. “You want me to keep the card?”

“Of course,” Lady Lydia says. “I told you, it’s your card. And remember...”

Tim looks up.

“Dreams are sometimes just dreams,” Lady Lydia says, and then her voice becomes impossibly small and low and silent, and Tim could almost swear that her lips don’t move. “But wolves are not always wolves.”

The door slams shut in his face. 

He turns away from the house on the edge of the woods. Further down, Catus and Brimmet and Avrin have made a campfire, and Tim can see the flames flickering in the warm breeze. 

Even further down, the wolf is waiting for him. Tim doesn’t understand half of what just happened to him, but he knows, now, that the wolf wants him to follow it. 

Tim pockets his card and makes a choice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you! Please leave a comment/kudos if you did, I'd love to hear from you. Thanks!


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tim is a grown man, almost. Tim will not blow a raspberry at a Goddess.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hand of ash time! And it didn't go quite how I imagined it, but I like it this way. There may have to be a few more chapters than planned, to truly flesh out the world? I hope nobody minds. Anyway, next chapter is back to the Bats point of view. Enjoy!

“You don’t know about the Old Gods?”

Baron looks shocked. Tim’s never met anyone with such an impressive fish-face before, although it’s mostly obscured by his grey, bushy beard. Tim begins his slow walk around the library - room, really, although it’s full of scrolls and a few leather-bound books, and it’s the only one in the whole town with such things inside, so technically it’s a library. The wolf had led him here, right up to the doorstep, and frightened the shit out of Baron, who was half-dozing on a rocking chair outside. 

The wolf had disappeared, and Tim had been ushered inside while Baron rambled on and on about Gods and Guides and old, deep magic. 

“I don’t know much about this world,” Tim says. He figures it’s better to be honest, here, if he wants answers, but he’s still cautious. This man could be anybody. He seems harmless enough, but people have said the same about Tim. 

Baron looks at him keenly. 

Tim arches an eyebrow. “Have you heard of portals?”

“By my beard, boy, you’re not saying what I think you’re saying, are you?” Baron says faintly. He shakes himself, clearly excited, and then strolls towards one of the shelves, withdrawing a scroll and unravelling it. 

“This details everything there is to be told about the Old Gods,” Baron says. “There isn’t much to be found on them unless you travel further North, where they still worship them. But I think what you’ll find will interest you. You can’t take it out of this room, but I’ll let you stay and read awhile, if you answer a few questions for me.”

“That sounds fair,” Tim agrees eventually, taking the scroll. There are no chairs, so he settles on the floor with the scroll in his lap. The wolf appears again, trotting through the door and settling itself at Tim’s side. 

“Phenomenal, just phenomenal,” Baron murmurs, watching them with barely concealed awe. 

Tim doesn’t quite understand why, until he reaches the halfway point of the scroll. He reads the same sentence three times, before he whips his head around and stares at the wolf. 

“You’re a _God_?”

_Stupid boy,_ says the wolf, except the words are in his head. Tim barely stops himself from flinching back, and Baron cackles. 

“She’s speaking to you?” 

“She called me stupid,” Tim says, still a little stunned. The wolf leans forward and presses her snout against his arm. It’s cold, and Tim shudders. 

“Her name is Via, Goddess of the Travellers, Guide to those that are lost,” Baron says, voice hushed. “When I saw her coming up the steps to my house, I damn near fainted. The good Gods, the ones of Old, they don’t show themselves much anymore. Humanity is progressing a little quicker than they’d like, I’d say.” A touch of bitterness. 

“What does she want with me?” Tim asks, although he can guess. 

_To take you home._ Via lifts her head, and her gaze pierces through him. _Wherever that may be._

“I know where home is,” Tim says. “I just don’t know how to get there.”

“Through the portals, of course,” Baron says. “I assume you came through one, and you’re waiting to return through it? I’m afraid that’s unlikely. They open every five years, you see.”

Tim’s heart sinks like a stone. He feels bile rise in his throat, but his face is a blank mask. “Five years?”

Baron waves a hand. “Some people believe that portals open whenever they choose, but I’ve studied them extensively. I expect that’s why the Goddess brought you here. There’s a pattern. They open all over the world, but only at certain points, and at certain times. Each one opens every five years.”

“Could I not go through one that’s going to open in a few days?” Tim asks. “They must open at different times, like a wave.”

“Exactly,” Baron says, nodding. “A wave. But I wouldn’t risk it. I would go back through the one you came through. Higher chance that it will lead you home. Some worlds are better suited to each other, you see, and the pathways between them are stronger, less frayed.”

Tim thinks on this for a minute. He thinks and thinks, and Via watches him carefully, and Baron mutters under his breath about portals and impossibilities, and then Tim straightens. 

“I am not waiting five years. Is there another way?”

Baron stares at him, nonplussed. “The portals are the only way. My dear boy, are you really that determined?”

“To go home?” Tim asks, half-laughing. “To see my family, and my friends? My city? Yes, I’m determined. I’m not staying here any longer than I have to. Five years is too long.”

The silence settles around them. After a moment, Baron pats his beard thoughtfully. “I wonder…”

“What is it?”

“You could always open the portal yourself,” Baron suggests. “It would take an immense amount of power, and months of training, but we could shorten the length from five years to one, or two.”

Via nudges him. 

Two years is infinitely better than five, although it still pretty much sucks. But it’s still better, and there’s just the question of how standing between him and home. 

“I don’t have magic,” Tim says. “Or power. I’m human all the way through.”

“But you’re not stupid,” Baron says sharply. “You can learn. Anyone can learn anything, with the right tools and the correct instruction. I can tell you where to go, and the Goddess can lead you there, and you can train. It will be hard, gruelling work, but something tells me you’re not unfamiliar with training.”

Tim snorts, thinking of Bruce. Becoming Robin had been no cake walk, and re-learning everything, when he became Red Robin, had been even harder, in some ways. But he had Bruce to teach him the first time, and he had Bruce’s words in his head the second time. 

God, he misses Bruce. He wonders if Bruce is looking for him, the way Tim looked for him, or if he’s given up. Maybe he never looked at all. 

Tim shakes the thought away. It won’t do to dwell on it. 

“Well?” Baron asks, and Via nudges him again. Tim stares into bright eyes and feels a strange sense of peace deep inside him. 

_There is wonder here,_ Via says. _Do not be afraid to change._

*

Tim knew the old man was up to something when he sent him out here. The people of Brickholm, Baron’s hometown, are deathly afraid of the forest on one side of their town, the forest that Tim walked through with Via, the forest where he left behind Catus and Avrin and Brimmet. But they’re even more afraid of the land on the other side of their town, the land of black, cracked stone, riddled with bones and the odd silver snake. Tim can’t really begrudge them their fear; it’s not exactly picturesque. 

So it’s suspicious, when Baron sends him off with a leather pack and a shifty gaze, and normally Tim would dig for answers, refuse to move until he knows what he’s walking into, but Via had seemed okay with it, and Tim has learned to trust Via. Besides, Baron can be pretty tight-lipped about a lot of things, as Tim’s learned over the past few days, and it’s not like Tim can’t handle himself. He has his training, and his mind, and Via. 

He still can’t get over the fact that Via is a Goddess, and part of him wants to pretend she’s just a big dog, to get rid of some of the fear, but the rest of him is not that stupid. 

When he reaches the strange cluster of boulders a few miles from Brickholm town, he stops, as instructed. From above, the boulders create the constellation of Duustrius, the Old God of the Dark. All of the Gods and Goddesses have constellations named after them, but this one is on the ground, rather than written in the sky, and it makes Tim nervous. 

Via trots ahead of him, leading the way to a particularly large boulder, with a crater beside it. The crater is just big enough for someone to squeeze through, and Tim stops beside it, staring down into the darkness. 

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he says blankly. Via stares at him steadily, tosses her snout at the crater, and then settles back to watch. 

“I take it you’re not coming with me, then?” Tim says drily, as he takes the pack off his shoulder and crouches down to inspect the crater. He can’t see how deep it goes. He’s not afraid of the dark, not really, but this doesn’t seem like a normal sort of darkness. 

_Light will take my place_ , Via says. Tim still jolts a little whenever she speaks, but the warmth of her voice settles his nerves. And then he registers her words, and he searches for wood for a torch, and digs in the pack until he finds what he needs, and soon he has a flaming torch in his hands. 

“Probably should have lit this after I got down there,” Tim muses. It takes a few minutes for him to manoeuvre inside the crater with the torch held aloft, and when he lets go of the ridge, falling down into the dark space, his feet hit hard ground almost instantly. 

_Not a long drop, at all,_ Via says. She sounds almost smug. 

Tim is a grown man, almost. Tim will not blow a raspberry at a Goddess. He’s never even been tempted by stuff like that before, so he really must be changing. 

He gathers himself, lifts the torch, and steps into the darkness. 

*  
The God of the Dark is lonely. Tim can feel it pouring from his fingers, which are wrapped tightly around Tim’s waist, lifting him up into the air. He sucks in a pained breath and wipes blood out of his eyes with his free hand. The other clutches the torch like a lifeline, and for all he knows, it is. 

Duustrius has the face of a rip in time and space, a gaze darker than black matter. It bores into Tim, and he squeezes his eyes shut. There’s a kind of feeling within him, the kind he gets when he stands in churches and old places, stares at the architecture of Gotham or the sun when it rises, on a particularly cold day. A feeling of awe that’s more than awe, a feeling that’s so encompassing and vast that it’s almost like fear. 

He wipes more blood away; he’s bleeding all over, and the few creatures that he’d managed to kill with fire on the way in had bled all over him too. 

Baron had told him to stand on the edge of the chasm, when he found it, and scream his wish. Tim had thought it was stupid, but things are different here. There is hope for the strangest of things. 

So he had done it, wished for a way home, for magic, for the ability to make portals, and the hand had come up, and now he’s in mid-air, above a chasm of fire and magic, staring into the eyes of a God. 

Duustrius leans down. “You are the first to come here in a long time.”

“Desperation will do that to you,” Tim gasps. “No offence, buddy, but I’m not surprised. You may want to brighten the place up a little, you know? A few homey touches, maybe a rug. Some pest deterrent. Air freshener, that kind of thing.”

He’s rambling. Snark is in his blood, as Dick says, but rambling is Tim’s thing, when he’s beyond nervous. The two combined make for a very bad time. There is a very long pause after Tim's words. 

“Mortals are confusing,” Duustrius says, and he almost sounds… uncomfortable? Tim pauses, stops struggling, and squints up at the God. He’s just a mass of moving shadow and ash, but Tim can pick out his eyes, a little darker than the rest of him. 

“Yeah, we can be a bit of a pain at times, can’t we?” Tim says. He has no idea what he’s doing. 

“Yes,” Duustrius says eagerly. There’s something - childlike? - about his voice. “Yes, you can. You understand, I see.”

Tim pats one of the giant fingers gripping him. “I do, buddy. I’ll try not to be too confusing. I was just told to come here, and ask for something. Something I really wanted.”

Duustrius cracks a deep sigh, and a gust of wind blows over Tim, sending him reeling. He smacks his mouth a few times, coughs as ash settles into the blood on his face. 

“Mortals often want things when they venture here. It is never simply to visit.”

Tim blinks. Gapes. Closes his mouth and clears his throat. “Uh, I’m sorry? We should really be more considerate of your feelings. Although, it might help if you didn’t grab people as soon as you saw them. Just a thought. It’s kind of… painful?”

Duustrius blinks at him, and then there’s a panicked, rumbling sound, and Tim is lowered carefully to the ground. He steadies himself and then stands there, completely stumped. 

“I apologise, mortal. I meant no harm.”

“Tim. My name’s Tim, if you want to use that instead of mortal. And no harm done, Duustrius - may I call you that? Or can I call you… what about Dusty? That’s a bit less of a mouthful.”

“Please do not devour my name,” Duustrius says, confused, and Tim shakes his head. 

“No, it’s just an expression. But Dusty, that’s a nickname, you know? Something you call your friends.”

He tries to sound soothing, and it must work, because Duustrius straightens a little, taken aback but clearly considering it. 

“Friends?” Duustrius says, and as he looms over Tim, Tim feels that rush of fear and awe again. He feels tiny, insignificant, and he shivers in the face of such monstrousness. But Duustrius’s voice is small and unsure, specked with hope, when he asks, “Is that what we are, Tim? Friends?”

Tim spits out another mouthful of ash, and smiles up at him, pained. “Sure, Dusty. That’s what we are.”

It's not like he's going to say _no_. 

*  
Via is smug when Tim crawls out of the crater, hours later. He’s dirty and covered in ash and blood, and he’s sweaty from sitting by the fire for so long, and he doesn’t particularly want to traipse back to Brickholm. 

_You spent many hours down there. You must have had fun._

Tim stares at her incredulously. “Fun? What gave it away? The pints of blood soaked into my clothes? You could have warned me that there was a God down there. So could Baron - I swear he knew, or he wouldn’t have acted so shifty. You’re both on my shit-list.”

Via simply waits. 

Tim collapses back against the ground. “Just for the record, your kind are dicks. That was the nicest God I’ve ever met, and the others ignore him because he’s young - in your terms - and destined to turn evil, according to some bullshit prophecy. Nobody’s destined for evil. That’s complete crap.”

Via obviously isn’t interested in him dissecting the inner workings of her and her family. She turns her nose up, and waits for him to finish ranting. 

“He’s going to forge me something, to help me channel the magic I learn,” Tim says, once he’s exhausted all his anger. “He said a sword would suit me, but I asked for a staff. I know how to use those. Although I may pick up a sword anyway, as a back-up.”

_How long?_

“Dusty said it should take three nights to build it,” Tim says, levering himself off the ground. A light shimmers across the black plains - Brickholm, warm and distant. “I’m going to visit every day, just so he’s not alone. And then we’re leaving, aren’t we? It’s time to move on.”

Via dips her head. _We go North. To the Temples and Tombs, the Palace of Old, and the Great Dragon in the Sky._

Tim lets his voice turn drier than dust. “Well, doesn’t that sound just _grand_?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the lovely response to the last chapter, I hope you liked this one just as much. Please leave a comment/kudos and let me know what you thought, I'd love to hear from you! Thanks!


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “He looks like a corpse,” Damian snaps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Bats! A bit shorter, because most of the story lies with Tim now. Back to Tim next time! Hope you like it :)

The pictures return. Dick wishes he had a chair, because the sight of Tim knocks the breath out of him. He keeps himself standing purely because everyone else does. He digs down deep for the bit of him that’s purely Nightwing, and grimly faces the picture on the wall. 

Tim is deathly still, lying down with his arms lax at his sides. There’s no blood on him - in fact, he looks remarkably clean, but that might have something to do with the swirls of energy hovering above him. There’s a bamboo mat beneath him, and beneath that, stone tiles make up the floor he’s lying on. The stone is painted a deep red, with black letters set into the seams of each tile. Dick can’t tell what they’re saying - the language is different, foreign, not of this earth. Dick can see intricate pillars, a glimpse of sunlit sky, and not much else. 

The patches of blue beneath Tim’s eyes are deep as bruises, and he looks thinner, more gaunt. It gives him a hollow look. Dick itches to reach out, but it’s just a picture on a wall, and it isn’t even of the present. This has already happened. There’s nothing he can do for this memory of Tim, this old image. 

“He looks like a corpse,” Damian snaps, and Dick knows him well enough to know that the anger is mostly a front for fear. There’s a little bit of contempt mixed in, for Tim getting himself into this situation, and anger that he can’t do anything practical to help, but it’s mostly fear. 

“Don’t say that,” Steph snaps. Cass squeezes her shoulder. 

They quiet down when movement draws their focus back to the pictures. Figures move into view around Tim, swathed in unusual blue robes, masks over their faces, hands lit with a velvet purple glow. The glow floats down to encase Tim, swallowing him up, and Dick watches as he jolts once, twice, and then grows still. 

The room collectively holds its breath. Dick swallows back bile as Tim lays there, limp and broken-looking. And then he starts to cough, and shake a little, and his eyes open just slightly before he falls still again. 

The picture fades away. 

Bruce is the first to round on Bob the Villain. “Why did you stop it?”

“There was nothing else to show you of that day,” Bob says. “It continues in the same vein, I imagine. I believe that was a week or so after he encountered the hand of ash.”

“He’s sick,” Dick says, his pulse bounding along. “Really sick.”

“Great deduction there, Dickie,” Jason says, clapping him on the shoulder, although his expression is grim. “Question is, what’s wrong with him, and have they got a way to survive it, wherever the fuck he is?”

Dick shoots him a half-hearted glare, but then Alfred clears his throat, almost hesitant, and all eyes immediately turn to him. Alfred is rarely ever hesitant. 

“I do believe I may know what ails him,” Alfred says. He clears his throat again, and Dick gets this sinking feeling inside. “It may have something to do with his lack of spleen.”

The Cave falls silent. 

“His lack,” Bruce says, slowly, “of spleen.”

“Master Timothy came to me a few months after he returned you to us, Master Bruce,” Alfred explains. “Or rather, he was brought to me, by his friends, the Titans. Master Timothy was rather unwilling to come of his own accord, and even less willing to divulge any information, but they explained his predicament. His spleen was removed at some point during his… time away.”

Dick pinches the bridge of his nose. He can feel a headache coming on, which means that Bruce already has one, and Jason’s not far behind. 

“He did not say how,” Cass says, crossing her arms. Alfred inclines his head at her. 

“He never said a damn word,” Steph says, incredulous. “I mean, I know everything’s pretty much screwed. I know none of us are as close to him as before, but you’d think he’d mention that he was missing a pretty vital organ.” She rounds on Bruce. “How the hell didn’t you know?”

Bruce doesn’t reply. His fists tighten at his sides, and if it were anyone else, Dick would think they didn't care. Would think that their expression was stone-cold and unbothered, but Dick knows Bruce, and he knows how much he cares about Tim, despite how long it took for them to get to this point, and despite how much stuff there is between them, and despite how badly he shows it. 

He knows that expression; it’s pain and guilt and a bit of shock. 

“Look, that ain’t really the point right now,” Jason says, frowning at the blank cave wall, his accent thickening slightly with worry. “He’s got no spleen, no meds, no drugs, and basically, no fucking immune system, and from what we can see, it’s a pretty primitive damn world he’s living in right now. So what the fuck do we do? How do we help?”

“Help?” Bob the Villain laughs. “Help? If he lived through it, there will be more to see, and you can help by watching the rest and helping me bring him back, along with my artifact. If he didn’t - and he might not have, for there are many days between then and now - then there’s no help to give.”

The punch that Jason delivers leaves the man gasping in his chair. The crack echoes off the walls. 

Damian makes a small noise of discontent. “You did not hit him hard enough, Todd.”

“What makes you say that, Demon?” Jason watches the blood dribble down from Bob the Villain’s nose with a satisfied nod. 

“He is still breathing.”

“That’s enough,” Bruce says. “Show us the next day.”

Bob the Villain glares, but rather wisely doesn’t make a sound. Dick’s fist itches to fly at his face as well, but he’s also ready to see the next day, to check and make sure that Tim’s okay, that he’s alive. 

The picture morphs into the same scene, except that Tim isn’t there. Dick sucks in a breath, his heart stopping in his chest. The bamboo mat is empty. The sky is a little darker, tinged with threads of black and grey. And then it shifts, and Tim is there, standing in a circle of the same cloaked figures, hands raised towards a vivid orange sunset. 

“He’s alive,” Dick breathes, voice packed with relief. 

“Sure is,” Jason murmurs, narrowing his eyes at the picture. “And he’s messin’ around with something that don’t ought to be messed with.”

“What do you mean?” Damian snaps. 

Jason jerks a thumb at the picture. “Look at his hands. That ain’t natural.”

Dick looks. There’s a white, silvery glow around Tim’s hands, fluid and lithe, wrapping itself around his fingers and caressing the fragile bones. It drips down his arms and pools at his shoulders, but it’s brightest at his hands. 

Tim walks off to the side, and the picture follows him. The stone tiles drop down into a small alcove, similar to the one he’d been laying in. There’s another bamboo mat, although this time, the figure laying on top of it is a young girl. 

Tim crouches down, his back to the picture. A wolf appears at his side, between one moment and the next, and nudges him in the side. The same white, shivering magic laps at her paws, which are stained with dirt and blood. She leans into Tim, and shares a look with him, before turning to stare directly out of the picture. Dick can feel her gaze rip through him, and he coughs out a gasp, his lungs tight, all of a sudden. 

And then her gaze moves, back to Tim, and Tim does something. He does something; he raises his palms and presses them to the girls heart and neck, and he breathes white light into her. 

The girl spasms once, and then she takes a deep breath, and opens her eyes. 

The scene fades again. 

“That ain’t natural,” Jason says again, into the stunned silence. “It ain’t human. Something’s different, there, with him. I dunno what that place is doing to him, but it can’t be good.”

“He healed her,” Cass says. “How is that not good?”

“It’s not _bad_ , exactly,” Steph says haltingly. 

“But it isn’t Drake,” Damian spits out. “Drake does not heal. He is not magical. He is completely human.”

Bob the Villain laughs, voice stuffy with pain. “Not anymore.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wayoo, thank you! Please leave a comment or a kudos if you enjoyed it, that would mean the world to me! Thanks so much!


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Niv’Ja are faceless people. Healers. Creepy as fuck, in Tim’s humble opinion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so! I think we'll stick with Tim for now to move the story along, so next up will be the tombs. I really hope you enjoy this one! Sorry it's been a while!

Via leads him North. The journey is long and hard, and it grows colder the further they go. The sky turns grey and the mountains they climb start to grow slick with ice. Snow falls down in soft flakes and drenches him in cold. Tim uses the staff Duustrius forged for him as a walking stick. 

It’s a thing of beauty. Dark as ash and moulded to fit his hands perfectly. Long and well-balanced. When he taps a small notch in the middle three times, it shrinks down to the size of a wand, and Tim can tuck it out of sight if he needs to. There’s a sword too, strapped around his waist. It looks elegant, with sigils scrawled down the flat of the blade. The hilt is a vivid gold, and reminds Tim of the depths of fire in Dusty’s home. It was a gift, a little something extra to thank Tim for being his friend. 

Dusty had been pretty upset that Tim had to leave. He had howled precisely once, a drawn-out sound that whipped through the air and caused cracks and fissures to form in the ceiling. And then he had hunkered down, small and pained, and spoken sadly of how lonely he was during the hours Tim was away. 

Tim had felt something in him crack, and he had poured every ounce of energy he had into convincing Baron to visit while Tim was away. Baron had been surprisingly reluctant, for someone who revelled in the tales of the Old Gods, but then he had met Dusty, and his fears had lifted, and Tim was as okay with leaving as he was going to be. He had spent the first half of their journey wondering if there would be a way to talk to Dusty when he returned home.

They camp in the open, under low trees and starry nights. It’s not as glamorous as the stories and video games Tim used to consume made it out to be. The ground is rough and lumpy, and the blankets don’t do much to keep out the chill. Tim is always wet and cold and covered in dirt and frost. 

On the third day of their journey, Via gets tired of his muttered complaints, and she teaches him something new. 

_It’s magic,_ she says. 

Tim stops fiddling with the rough edges of his blanket and eyes her. She’s been telling him stories, this whole time, and he has the things that Baron’s taught him so far locked away tight. “The good kind?”

_There is no good or bad magic. Only good and bad people who wield it. I have told you this._

He builds a shelter with his hands. He draws deep inside his energy source, at Via’s instruction, feeling the swirling mass of energy in his soul that can be transmuted into magic. It shouldn’t be possible. He’s never been able to feel his soul before, but on his first day under Baron’s roof, they performed an awakening ritual, to unlock all the little doors in Tim’s blood. It involved too many animal bones for Tim to be truly comfortable with it, but he needs to be able to open the portal, when he finds it. 

The magic pours from his hands in a wave of blue light that tucks itself around and under him, creating a shield from the elements. It’s warm and quiet in the little bubble he makes for himself, and Tim breathes a sigh of relief. 

_It will not shield you from attack, but it will keep you dry, at least. You can hold it in place while you sleep. And then I will not have to listen to you whine._

She says it fondly, or so Tim tells himself. 

The next night is far more comfortable. The one after that, Tim can’t remember at all. 

*

The Niv’Ja are faceless people. Healers. Creepy as fuck, in Tim’s humble opinion. They literally have no faces, and Tim’s pretty practiced at keeping his reactions internal, but he can’t help but rear back with a shout when he wakes to find them leaning over him. 

“What am I doing here? Who the hell are you? Where’s Via?”

“You are in the Temples of the Niv’Ja. We are the Niv’Ja, the Healers of the North. You took ill on the road, and you were brought to us by your sacred companion.”

“Via,” Tim murmurs, glancing around. The mat beneath him is made of bamboo, yet it’s the most comfortable thing he’s ever sat on. His whole body aches, but he pushes it aside. He is quite used to aches and pains, and his training has taught him to push through it. If he can fight with a concussion and several broken bones, then he can sit up when his stomach hurts. 

He sits up and almost vomits. He presses a hand deep into his side and breathes deeply, glancing up at the Niv’Ja through his lashes. 

“What did you do to me?”

“We shifted your soul.”

Tim blinks at them. “Charlie _what_ now?”

The faceless figure above him sighs, somehow. There’s no mouth, and yet the sounds come out regardless. Where there should be features, there’s just a smooth stretch of skin. More of them linger just behind the Niv’Ja that’s talking to him, a little further up inside what is presumably the Temple, although Tim’s never seen a Temple that’s open to the air before. 

“An organ of yours was lost, some time ago,” says the Niv’Ja. “It should have resided here.”

It reaches down to brush its fingers over where the pain is. Tim jerks back, but there is something soothing about the touch. The pain lessens a little, and he can breathe clearly. 

“Instead we found a mess of space,” the Niv’Ja continues. “That was the organ that should have protected you from the injuries you sustained whilst here. The cuts and the air have let darkness into your body.”

Tim translates in his head. The spleen should have protected him from bacteria, to help his immune system and stop him from getting sick in this new world, but it obviously wasn’t there, and Tim is without his usual meds. 

“So I got sick, and you… you shifted my soul?” Tim asks. 

“We moved your soul down into the space where the organ should have resided. Your magic, which lives in your soul and is now awake, will keep you safe from illness now. It may drain a little of your energy, but none so more than usual.”

Tim doesn’t quite know how he’s supposed to take that. The idea that his soul lives in the area where his fingers are pressed against fills him with a thrill of fear. 

He swallows back his fear and nods at the Niv’Ja. “I owe you my thanks, then. I’m going to assume it wasn’t an easy thing to do.”

“We almost lost you,” the Niv’Ja agrees. Tim - Tim doesn’t want to think about that. He doesn’t want to think about dying here, with nobody to mourn him, and leaving everyone back home without the knowledge that he’s dead. It’s probable that they’ve already assumed it, but he hopes they’re working to find him regardless. It’s stupid, to think otherwise, when he knows they do love him, but he can’t help but think it anyway, think that maybe they aren’t looking. Maybe they’ve given up. Maybe they never looked at all. 

An hour later, and Tim has been treated to a tour of the Temples of the Niv’Ja, which frankly is not as glamorous as they make it sound. It’s just slabs of blood-red stone set into the mountain, complete with tall pillars, each one decorated with winding writing that Tim can’t read. He runs his fingers over the blue symbols and feels the importance of it all deep down. He just doesn’t know why. 

“This is the language of the portals,” says the Niv’Ja, the one that was there when he awoke. The others are spiriting through the Temple, carrying bowls of water imbued with herbs, and cool cloths and ointments. There aren’t many patients, but several young men sit in the alcoves on each side of the Temple, and a young girl lies deathly still on a mat not unlike Tim’s. Tim tries not to look at her if he can help it.

“The portals have a language?” Tim asks. Baron hadn’t mentioned this. Tim hadn’t stayed as long as he thought Baron might have hoped, but a language related to the portals seems like a pretty big thing to mention. It’s possible that Baron just didn’t know about it, but for someone so obsessed with the ways of his own world, with portals and gods, it seems like something that’s impossible to miss.

The Niv’Ja bows its head. “The language on the pillars, written in blue, that is the language of portals. It is the language that must be spoken to open the portals, the language that must be written on walls to create doors.”

Tim sucks in a breath. It’s why they look so familiar - it’s the same symbols that were etched onto the wall when he came through, the symbols that lingered on the cliff-face while he searched for an artefact. 

“Oh,” he says. “Oh, fuck. I take it I’d need to know this language, if I was going to open a portal?”

The Niv’Ja doesn’t look surprised by his announcement. It nods. “You will also need to know the Ash Language, the black sigils on the ground. The two go hand in hand. They are inseparable. One is the language of openings, and the other of closings. Blue to open a door, and black to close it.”

“I don't really need to close it,” Tim says, rubbing his temples. “I’m just trying to get home.”

“You will not be able to understand the language of openings without first studying the Ash Language. And you will not find the Ash Language unless you travel deep into the Tombs of Trachalite. It is where the old, broken Niv’Ja reside.”

Tim grimaces. “We go North, to the Temples and Tombs.”

The Niv’Ja doesn’t have an eyebrow, but Tim suspects it would be raising it if it could. 

“That’s what my guide said, Via,” Tim explains. “You haven’t seen her, have you? She’s a big wolf. Probably scowling. Kind of hard to miss.”

“She brought you to us,” the Niv’Ja says. “She disappeared as you lay dying, and she has only returned once before leaving again.”

Tim blinks at it. “Lovely. Look, why can’t I just study the language here? It’s on your floor. Surely one of you must know what it means.” 

“We did not put it there,” the Niv’Ja says. “Our kind did, but none that still live. That is why you must go to the Tombs, to converse with the Unliving.” 

Tim eyes the Niv’Ja suspiciously. He got lucky, going down the crater and meeting Dusty, back in Brickholm, but he doubts he’s going to meet the same happy fate here. 

“The Unliving, huh?” Tim asks. “Friendly bunch, are they?” 

The Niv’Ja doesn’t dignify that with a response. 

Tim sighs gustily. “Alright, fine. Look, I’d rather do this with my guide, but if she doesn’t show up within a few hours, I’ll have to go down into these tombs myself. Can you tell me how to get there?”

“No,” the Niv’Ja says, because apparently it lives to be bluntly, calmly unhelpful. “Only the very young may guide travellers down into the Tombs of Trachalite, so as not to tempt them to stay. The young are the farthest from death, you see, and the Tombs have a way about them to draws you in, encases you.”

Tim shudders, and the Niv’Ja nods knowingly. 

“I cannot tell you how to reach them, as I have not ventured there myself. But I know someone who may help you, if you help her.”

And he turns to the alcove and points one long, gnarled finger at the dying girl.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading and commenting, please let me know what you think! Much appreciated!


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It has been,” Tim reiterates firmly, “a _long ass day.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, sorry, been a few!! Made some tiny edits to the last chapter if you wanna re-read!
> 
> Edit: I was literally RUNNING out of the door as I posted this on my phone, so I didn't say what I wanted to say! Sorry it's been so long, I got caught up in random life stuff. Thank you to everyone and anyone who's commented, kudosed, or just given this fic a click, you've kept inspiring me to come back to it, so thank you! Your words mean the world to me! I will keep writing this!
> 
> Some things: there are some gross descriptions of monsters in this, but not too graphic, I don't think? Just a bit creepy, and they do (spoiler) die, so watch out for that. Again, not graphic. It won't be two more chapters, it'll be more, sorry for the confusion, but I'll put 10 for now because I'm not quite sure how many. There are more Batfam reactions in the future but not quite yet! And yes, this world is entirely my own, I just borrowed the DC characters etc. The plot and other world and OC's are from my brain. Thanks!!

The girl lives. The silver magic inside him - the energy that flowed from his hands - doesn’t really leave him. He pours it into the girl and she lives, but it’s still there, inside him too. Or maybe his body’s just making more. Tim can feel it settling in his soul, in the place where his spleen used to be, and he can feel it begging to be released. The healing sapped his strength, so he sits in one of the alcoves while the Niv’Ja tend to the girl, and recovers slowly. 

A girl that was just dying. A girl that he saved with his own bare hands and the magic that lives in them now. Tim stares dazedly ahead and tries not to think about that. 

Is it right, what he did? Does he even have a choice? If he saw someone facing down a gun, he would push them out of the way and take the bullet if he could. If he saw someone falling from a building, he would do everything he could to catch them, even if it meant he hit the ground instead. If he found someone ill and dying on the ground, and he had the medicine that would help, he would give it to them, no matter what the cost to his own health. That's what he did as Robin, and it's what he does as Red Robin, and it's what he will always do as Tim.

Magic, he decides, is just another form of medicine. A grapple. A shield. A tool. 

Via watches him silently as he drinks water from a wooden bowl. Her eyes are far too judgemental. 

_Reckless,_ she says. _You should have waited for me._

“I wasn’t sure if you were coming back,” Tim says. He puts the bowl down by his feet and drags his hand across his mouth, wiping away the moisture. He can see snow further down the mountain, but the Temple is warm despite the lack of walls. 

Via pads closer and noses his cheek. _I will always come back. I will not leave you. Not like they did._

Tim lifts a hand cautiously and rests it on Via’s head, feels the soft velvet of her ears beneath his fingers. 

“You’re talking about my family,” Tim guesses. Via makes a sound, a light rumble in her throat that could be the beginnings of a growl, or even a derisive snort.

“Nobody left me,” Tim says, although the words land soft and shallow between them. “If anything, I left them. Not that I wanted to, but it was the only way to keep everyone else safe. But they didn't leave me. I don't know where you got that idea from.”

_From your eyes._

Tim purses his lips. The Niv’Ja comes up then, distracting him from a harsh retort that Via wouldn’t deserve. He turns away and nods at the Niv’Ja, wobbling to a stand. 

“Is she alright?” Tim asks, jerking his head at the girl. She stands just behind the Niv’Ja, stiff, with curious eyes that look far too black to be healthy. There’s a thick woollen cloak wrapped around her, and her limp hair has been plaited tightly on top of her head. Her face is still pale, still gaunt, but Tim reckons he doesn’t look much better. Plus, she did almost just die. Nobody would look their best after that. 

“She lives, thanks to you,” says the Niv’Ja. “She has agreed to guide you, but you must recover before you step down into the Tombs. The first Healing is always the hardest, and it will take several hours before you are back to your full strength. Where you are going, you will need it.”

“That’s not ominous at all.” Via nudges the back of his knees, hard, and Tim stumbles slightly. “I mean, thank you. I’ll be sure to rest up. Does she, uh, does she have a name?”

“Not that we could uncover,” the Niv’Ja says, sounding unconcerned. “There are many children in the mountains, young and wild. Most do not survive the snow. Most are unnamed. I’m sure she will speak, given time, but for now we are calling her Girl.”

“Right. Really creative.”

The Niv’Ja bows its faceless head and beckons Girl over. She steps forward on sure feet, and if Tim wasn’t looking so closely, he wouldn’t have been able to guess that she had almost died only an hour before, not with the way she moves, stealthy and easy, as though the land belongs to her.

Girl reaches Tim’s legs. She comes up to his ribs, and she’s a tiny little thing in weight and height, swaddled in not enough cloth. Tim takes his own blanket off and bundles her up in it, and she takes hold of the edges with large, owlish eyes. The sound she makes in her throat is hoarse and pained, and Tim winces, patting her awkwardly on the shoulder. 

“It’s alright, you don't have to talk. Not unless you want to. I’m Tim. I know the Niv’Ja said you’d guide me down to the Tombs, but I’m not going to make you. You don't have to, if you don't want to.”

She cocks her head sideways, thoughtful, and then cracks a yawn. She’s missing a tooth, off to the side. She looks so small, so helpless, and Tim can’t help but think of Cass, who was fierce and deadly but lonely at first, hurt by others and left to her own devices, left to grow alone. He misses her suddenly, with a wave of emotion that he can’t push down, can’t ignore, and he keeps himself very still, swallowing back tears.

He really is exhausted. So, apparently, is Girl. 

Girl folds herself down onto the ground, curling up to sleep. Her eyes fall shut almost immediately. Tim stares down at her with a blank expression.

“Right. Glad we got all that cleared up, then.”

Via nudges him again, kinder this time, and then stoops until she’s curled herself around the child. Her eyes remain open, watchful, guarding Girl from unkindness.

*

The Tombs of Trachalite are nothing like Dusty’s home. Dusty’s home was skin-splitting heat and dense darkness, the warmth of the hearth and the thundering crack of a childish, ancient laugh. 

The Tombs are almost the complete opposite. They lie deep in the base of the mountain, and it takes a full day to reach the bottom. Girl scampers ahead, clambering easily over rocks and trudging through the snow with youthful determination. She puts Tim in mind of a baby goat, her feet and hands finding hooks in the rock easily, mindless of the ice covering them. Via follows, barking at nothing, her snout shaping smiles as she scuffs up snow, running alongside Girl. Girl wavers between delight and terror at the sight of the wolf, but ultimately she doesn’t shy away.

Tim feels older than the mountain itself, and he pants as he tries to catch up. His hands are scraped raw by the time he makes it to the bottom and sits heavily on a rock. A frozen river runs alongside the cave in the face of the mountain, a ribbon of white and blue. Fish dart beneath the stony surface, and their energetic swimming seems to mock him. 

He’s used to grappling his way across city-scapes and punching muggers in the face. He knows his way around a concrete jungle, across sparring bats and trapeze bars, over deserts in search of clues. His feet are at home when he’s perched somewhere high, watching. He’s always, always pushed himself to the breaking point, and sometimes beyond that. He strives to be the best, to not fall short of the shadow that Jason left behind, the one that Dick still casts, the one that Damian smugly calls his own, and he hasn’t minded the consequences of that. 

Now, though, he can barely catch his breath. It’s the change, he knows, in his soul and his environment, in his diet and stress levels. It's natural, to feel worse in a place like this, with all that's happening. It doesn’t make him feel much better though.

“Nowhere in the vigilante contract did it say I’d one day have to scale a snow-covered mountain to speak to some dead healers.”

Via snorts softly from where she’s perched near the cave entrance. _It would not have stopped you if it did._

The Tombs are hidden behind a door set into the ground, inside the cave. A thick patch of snowy pine trees almost obscures the mouth of the cave, but Girl knows the way. She waits by the door, her wide eyes unblinking as she watches him curiously. She taps her chest twice, once where each lung would be, and then draws a circle around the place where Tim’s spleen used to be, the place where his soul now resides. 

“What? I don't need healing,” Tim says, as he straightens up. “It’s just been a very long day.”

She taps her chest again, once over each lung.

 _She thinks you are dying._ Via sounds a second away from barking out laughter. _The way your breaths rasp is making her worry._

“It has been,” Tim reiterates firmly, “a _long ass day.”_

The doors have the symbols on them, the Ash language, as the Niv’Ja put it, engraved into the surface of heavy red wood. 

“Cave at the bottom of the mountain, doors down into tombs, black language I have to learn, generally creepy atmosphere,” Tim mutters. “I think that’s everything on the checklist. We’re in the right place, but have you got any idea what I’m up against? Or what I’m looking for down here?”

For a moment, he thinks Via is going to be her usual cryptic self, vague and unhelpful. This time, though, she moves forward through the snow and noses at the door. 

They open outward with a creak, a groan of rotting wood. A gust of stale air climbs out.

Tim takes a hasty step back. Girl scuttles away, her eyes fixed on the doors. 

_I was told stories of this place while the young one slept. She did not mean to come here, but the place lures everyone, living or dead. She dreams of it, at times. It is cold and unforgiving, and the faceless monsters are not so faceless here. She has seen Sigils on the walls, written in black light, at the far end of the Tombs of Trachcalite._

The words send a shudder down Tim’s spine. He faces Girl, crouching down until he’s at her eye-level, and keeps his palms where she can see them. 

“I have to go down there,” Tim says, speaking carefully. “I don't want you to come with me, though. Via told me that you’ve been here before, that you’ve seen markings on the walls. Can you show me what they look like?”

Girl’s face changes, her shoulders drooping. Her mouth grows a little slack with relief, and she nods fervently. 

Tim waits as she bends to put her hands in the snow beneath the trees, tracing shapes in the slushy surface. He studies the shapes, the curves and lines, and he commits them to memory. 

When she’s done, Girl sits back on her haunches and blows out a breath. She does look like a wild thing like this, her hair falling free from the tightly knotted plait, her cheeks hollowed, her eyes black. 

“Thank you,” Tim says softly, and then he reaches over and wipes the images away. “I’ll remember them, don't worry. Via’s going to stand guard with you out here, okay? Nothing will get you, and nothing will come out of the doors except me. Whatever happens, you _don't_ come down there. Understand?”

Girl nods sharply. Tim leaves her gazing at the frozen water, at the skeletal leaves that skitter across the surface, caught in the wind. 

“Via, will you look after her?”

_I do not like this. Sending you down there by yourself is far too risky._

“I can’t take her with me, not when she’s as scared as this. And I can’t leave her out here alone, either. She might have survived worse, but that doesn’t mean she should have to keep doing it.”

Via bows her head, but Tim can feel her frustration. _Then I will watch her. If you are not back soon, I will hide her and follow._

Tim can’t quite hide his relief at that. “Thanks, Via. Be careful out here.”

_I will take as much care as you._

*

The Tombs of Trachalite consist of a gloomy maze of tunnels, creeping deeper beneath the mountain. The scent of rot and decay permeates the air, sticking to his skin, and the air is cool, the walls damp with condensation. 

Tim gets turned around more than once. The third time he finds himself heading in the wrong direction, he cups his hands and holds still, thinking of light and warmth, thinking of that particular lamp in the library at the Manor, the one on the end-table in the corner. It’s beside that armchair that Bruce favours, the soft one with an abundance of cushions, and it carries a very specific yellow light that always douses the sleeping man in softness. 

His hands glow orange, at first, and then that yellow softness fills his hands. He bends to press his hands to his feet, to the thick leather boots, to rub the light all over the dirty soles. He leaves behind a shimmer, and when he walks, yellow footsteps glow on the ground behind him. 

He finds his way a little easier after that. More light lets him see the walls, but they’re earthen and wet, no sigils to be seen. He walks until his boots forget the earth, until his glowing footprints imprint themselves against cracked stone. 

He pauses in an archway. On each side, there are grooves in the wall, going up and up until they disappear into mist and grim darkness. In the grooves are skulls, some broken and shattered, some whole and grinning at him. 

“What a welcome.” Tim eyes the skulls before stepping a little further inside. “Not at all off-putting. You don't mind, do you?”

The skulls say nothing, leering at him. He’s sort of glad about that, but the silence still makes him drop his pathetic attempt at humour.

“These are the Tombs, then,” Tim whispers aloud, glancing around. The tunnels have opened up into a cavern, a towering cylinder right in the core of the mountain. The air feels thicker, dusty. There are tombs in the walls, plaques adoring each one, and some lie out in the open, turned on their sides, their coverings cracked in half. 

Pieces scatter the floor. Tim breathes in carefully and steps through the cavern, feeling restless and alert, his body tense with energy. He carefully unhooks his staff where it’s strapped across his back. 

Across the cavern, the light on his hands catches on a wall of white stone. Just a patch of it, almost consumed by moss and mould, but there, in the centre, are etchings. Sigils. 

The people of this world bless the Gods when fate smiles upon them. Tim might be travelling with a Goddess, but he’s still a boy from Gotham at heart. One who spent plenty of time with a grudging, spitting-nails Jason Todd. 

“Thank fuck for that,” Tim says instead, and he steps quickly over a mound of cloth to get to the wall. 

The mound of cloth moves. A gagging sound emerges from within it, and a bony, brittle hand grips his ankle, jerking him back. 

Tim cries out and swears as he falls, tucking his body in and rolling off to the side. His staff skitters in the opposite direction. He manages to absorb the fall despite his shock, popping up again and whirling around. 

The mound of cloth becomes something far, far worse than he could have imagined as the thing inside it stands up. 

“What are you?” Tim utters, his voice caught in his throat.

A hundred voices speak at once, falling from the mouth of the monster in front of him. 

“We are the Aj’Vin,” it says. “We thank you for our awakening.”

The Aj’Vin are grim mockeries of their brothers above. Rather than a faceless creature, he’s confronted with something twisted, ugly. 

Their faces are inside out. 

Tim recoils at the grotesque sight, close to retching, and then steadies himself with a heaving breath, fingers gripping the nearest damp, stone wall so that he doesn’t fall to his knees. His staff is just behind the Aj’Vin. 

“I didn't wake you,” Tim says, trying to keep his voice from fading into nothing. “I didn't do anything. I’m just here for a language, for help.”

“You like to help,” the Aj’Vin says, in a rasping voice. “We have seen. Try again, little bird. Try to help.”

Tim jolts at the name. Jason calls him Baby Bird, sometimes, and all the Robins have little names between them, all wing-related puns. It’s not possible for these _things_ to know about that though. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Tim asks, taking a careful step to the side, trying desperately to make himself look like he’s afraid, like he’s trying to get away rather than get towards his staff. It’s not hard to fix his face in grim horror. 

The Aj’Vin twists one hand out of its robes. It’s the same bony hand that gripped him, and if the face is anything to go by, then it’s possible that all the flesh is on the inside. He wonders distantly why their skulls aren’t visible, like the rest of the bone structure seems to be, and then he remembers the skulls in the grooves along the walls on the way in, and he shoves the thought back. He doesn’t want to know. 

"Try to help her."

Tim follows the hand, his eyes flickering nervously to the floor where the blunt, thin fingers are pointed. He blinks as his eyes adjust, and then he sucks in a shallow breath. He told her not to follow.

Girl lies on the floor just a few feet behind the Aj’Vin, convulsing slightly. Her hair spills loose and her frame shudders, small and close to breaking. 

“What did you do to her?” Tim demands, snarling as he stands up straight. His fear isn’t quite forgotten, but there’s an edge to it now, an urge to protect that’s halfway to overriding everything else. 

“When?”

Tim stares, nonplussed. The horror of those mouths moving, the exposed teeth gnashing and bloody gums dripping all over the floor doesn’t quite dampen the confusion Tim feels at the mocking question.

“What do you mean, when? She’s on the floor! What did you do to her?”

The grin he gets is ghastly, repulsive enough to rival even the Joker’s. “When?”

“You…” Tim trails off as he thinks. His eyes flit to Girl, on the floor. He didn't hear her come in. He didn't hear anything. One minute she wasn’t there, and the next she was. Via isn’t present either, and Girl is missing Tim’s blanket, the one she’d tied around her neck like a cape. 

Tim licks his lips. All around him, things are waking up in the walls. He can feel it, the change in the atmosphere as more of the Aj’Vin claw their way out of slumber.

The Aj’Vin’s eyes are flat slits. It’s _stalling_ him. 

“That isn’t her. This is from before. You hurt her, before. You were the reason she came to the Temple. You almost killed her for no reason.”

“No reason,” the Aj’Vin scoffs. Spit flecks Tim’s chin as the monster surges in close, looming over him, eyeballs rolling. Tim fights a wave of terror and plants his feet. 

“Yeah, no fucking reason. She’s a child!” 

“Children are not welcome here,” the Aj’Vin snarls. “They are cruel.” 

Tim’s hand scrabbles along the wall as he backs up suddenly, remembering to look afraid. He skirts around the Aj’Vin, which watches him with something amused buried in its cruel expression. 

“A cruel reminder, maybe,” Tim snaps. “She's young, and you don't like to think about what you used to be. You don't like to think about what you’ll never have again. Look at you. You’re _disgusting._ You know why?”

A flash of red in the Aj’Vin’s eyes. It grinds its teeth, and Tim can see where they connect, where they touch. Bony hands pound on the walls all around, dislodging bits of earth and lumps of stone. Dust rains down from above. 

“Why?” The Aj’Vin says, clearly taunting him, humouring him. “Because we are decaying, rotting down here? Because we are ugly and disfigured?”

“Because you’re clinging to life, but there’s none left in you,” Tim replies coolly. “You’re pathetic. You’re old and broken, and the world is moving on without you, and you’ll remain down here, convinced that you’re not dead, until one day you realise that you have always, always been dead. You are _dust._ You are nothing like you used to be, and no matter how long you cling here, you'll never be alive again.”

The image of Girl flickers and then blinks out, like a bulb bursting. 

“We used to be the Niv’Ja!” cries the Aj’Vin, in a howling voice that echoes all around the room, its face twisted in rage. Hands pry their way through the walls. A coffin slams into the ground and cracks, spilling bones onto the floor. 

Tim dives for his staff, snatches it up, and the Aj’Vin is so furious, so caught in its anger that it doesn’t notice, or maybe it doesn’t care. Tim backs up towards the white wall, the only wall that isn’t shaking, falling apart. 

“We were powerful, fearless!” the Aj’Vin howls, eyes manic. “We had magic in our soul, and we could play with death and life as we wished. We could bring people back from the brink of the abyss, or send them hurtling over the edge! We were unstoppable! We were _Gods!”_

“I have a few friends that would disagree,” Tim says, and he throws himself the last few feet, hands slamming against the wall. His fingertips touch the sigils. 

Nothing happens. His fingers race along the walls, tracing the shapes frantically, but nothing changes. He whips around, and the mountain still quakes, and there are more of the Aj’Vin now, climbing down from their dark spaces, their leers livid and bloody. Tim pushes fiercely on the swell of panic inside him, but he can’t think. His pulse thunders in his throat, jumping and stuttering. 

The first Aj’Vin stops speaking, and chuckles instead. It echoes off the walls. A laugh that haunts the minds of children. 

Children. Tim flicks his gaze to where the image of Girl was. That was no illusion created from a dark mind. It was the past, brought to the present. Girl had really been here, shaking and afraid, dying in the gloom. 

He doesn’t know how she got out, but he knows it wasn’t at the Aj’Vin’s mercy. 

Anger looks different in everyone. With Jason, it’s always there, simmering, waiting to boil over, and it exhausts him and enrages him further. With Damian, it spills out in harsh lashings of the tongue, in soft-spoken derision that cuts just as sharply as his well-placed blades. Bruce is single-minded, undistracted, undeterred. Dick is happy until he isn’t, cheerful until he’s not, bright until he’s burning mad with fire that won’t be contained. 

Tim is cool, calm, collected. Fear makes him a little clumsy, a little desperate, eager to get it right and save people. Anger turns him cold and careful, meticulous in his rage. 

He knows he has it in him, to be the kind of thing he’s spent his life trying to stop. Not to innocents, but to people like these. Monsters like these. 

“You have stopped,” the Aj’Vin laughs. A few stumble forwards, laughing too, the same laugh echoing from their inside-out throats. “You know the truth of now. You know your end is near. There is more than one type of God, Drake, and we are the kind that linger in your foolish cautionary tales. We will not be swayed. We will not be stopped. If you break us, we will put ourselves back together again. You have stopped because you know the truth of now.”

“And what would that be?” Tim asks, in a voice much calmer than he feels. The use of his last name unnerves him, sends his mind grasping at possible reasons, answers. The rest of him is focused. The Aj’Vin think he’s given up. The staff in his hands feels hot against his palms, and he can feel his soul inside him, and he knows, even if these monsters believe otherwise, that he’s far from giving up. 

“The truth of now is your end, and our awakening.”

The Aj’Vin lunges forward, its grin opening wide, teeth gnashing at nothing. 

Tim slams the butt of his staff into the Aj’Vin’s face. It howls as it careens backwards, surprised at him fighting back, but it shouldn’t be, not if it knows Tim. Tim whirls, kicking and dodging as the others surge towards him, swinging his staff in one hand and withdrawing his sword with the other. It’s not impossible to fight with both, but it makes things harder. Luckily, that’s not what Tim has planned. 

He swings his sword in an upwards arc and brings it down into the ground in front of him. It cleaves through the stone like butter and wedges itself there, glowing. The Aj’Vin stumble back as a thin wave of magic pushes them away, their faces contorted with fury. 

“If you hadn’t hurt her, I might have considered letting you live,” Tim says. 

The first Aj’Vin begins to talk, frustrated, but Tim sends another wave of magic towards them, feeling it rip the energy from his toes. 

“Oh, I was listening,” Tim assures it. “I was listening when you talked of not being stopped or swayed. But everything has an end, no matter how hard we try to avoid it. You’ve been abusing the power in this world for too long, and I think it wants to stop you whether you like it or not.”

The sigils on the wall still don't glow, or do much of anything really, not until Tim lifts his staff. He presses one end to the middle sigil, the one that looks a bit like a crescent moon. The black sigil glows briefly, then, and Tim feels his soul shift restlessly, searching. 

“It’s the Language of Closings. The Ash Language. I thought that this looked a bit like ash, this staff. And my friend, the one who made it, might not be well-loved among his family, but he’s still a God. I know he would agree with me. Maybe he even knew I’d come here.”

The Aj’Vin shift as one, suddenly unsure. 

“Do not--”

Tim cuts the first Aj’Vin off with a sharp movement of his wrist, digging the staff into the surface of the sigil. It glows, now, the glow never-ending. 

“Ending a life is sort of like closing one, don't you agree?” Tim asks, and he savours the look of horror, the look of fear on the Aj’Vin’s face as the glow brightens. The magic in him snaps. 

It roars through the room. Tim throws himself against the staff, keeping it pressed against the wall, against the sigil. Black light bursts forth, eating everything in sight. He can hear the screeching storm of voices as the Aj’Vin are devoured, their lives ended. Closed. 

It’s violent and quick. The black light fades, snuffed out suddenly. Tim wobbles, and turns to look at the room, feeling suddenly drained. 

There are mounds of cloth on the floor, and bits of stone and rubble, clumps of earth. No bones, no blood, no bodies. 

He can feel something in the air as the dust settles. Light peeks in from above, sending a shaft of gold over the room. The green seeps away from the walls, and the moss reveals white stone. He can smell grass and earth. Water trickles down the walls. There is still decay, deep in the earth, but not the kind that shouldn’t linger, not the unnatural kind. 

The skulls are still there, but their grins are lifeless. Solemn, rather than mocking. 

“Oh,” Tim says, exhausted. “You’re welcome.”

He doesn’t know who he says it too. The mountain, perhaps, the mountain that can breathe again. 

He glances down at his staff, feeling his energy waning. Supposedly he’ll get stronger soon, but even if he does, that was still a strong blast of magic. The staff shifts in his hand, shrinking down to the size of a wand. There, etched in one long line down the staff, are the sigils on the wall. 

He raises it in the air, twirls it in his fingers as the golden light catches it. There is a small groove on the other side, where another line of sigils would fit.

Footsteps bellow outside the cavern, down the twisting pathways, following his golden footsteps. He can hear Via in his head, her voice saying, _We sensed it, the change. The river is unfrozen. We’re coming._

Instinct grips him again, the way it had when he raised his sword, when he touched the staff to the wall, when he spoke to the mountain. He searches blindly with his mind for a moment before he stumbles on what he’s looking for. 

_Take your time, Via. There’s no rush._

Tim grins slowly at Via’s breathless jolt of shock, and passes out just before they round the corner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANKS SO MUCH FOR KEEPING THIS ALIVE! Please let me know what you think!! <3


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What they saw in the image was Tim unleashing magic on the small army, and what they saw was the army disintegrating into nothing.
> 
> What _Bruce_ saw was the fear and terror, the disgust and revulsion on his sons’ face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I mentioned in the comments that the Bats wouldn't appear for a while, but it makes more sense to put this shorter chapter here to break it up a bit. Tim will be next!
> 
> I haven't written this POV before but I tried very hard! I'm sorry if it feels wrong!

Bruce sits down carefully at the nearest workstation. The world takes on a hazy sheen, the familiar kind that allows his mind to distance itself, to think clinically rather than emotionally. Everything about him is careful right now, from the breaths that move steadily through his lungs, to the muscles in his face that refuse to twitch. He _must_ be careful. Partly because he feels older than he’s felt in a long time, like his bones are brittle and may fade and crack with the wrong movement, and partly because he _needs_ to look fragile. 

The bastard in the chair just a few feet away is trying to look solemn, his mouth pliant and saddened, but the smugness radiates off him like foul perfume. It’s a stench of satisfaction, pleasure at a job well done. 

“That’s not-” Dick cuts himself off abruptly, looking lost. The image on the wall of the Cave is gone, faded out of view, but Dick keeps staring at the rocky surface, like he’s willing it back. Like he’s willing for it to change, for the truth to remake itself.

“I’m afraid it is as it appears,” says the man. He sighs, long and drawn out, as though he truly regrets what they all just saw. Bruce grips the sides of the seat tightly.

“Calm yourself, Grayson,” Damian says stiffly, arms crossed tightly over his chest. “I find it… unlikely that Drake would resort to something quite so drastic.”

Dick’s hand brushes Damian’s shoulder, light enough that the man in the chair doesn’t appear to notice. A computer beeps in the background, and up above, the bats screech and sing their shrill songs. 

“Oh, but he did,” says the man, clearly enjoying the moment. His face is still red with blood from where Jason punched him, his voice claggy and thick. “I find myself wondering if that was the only option, even. I would hate to cast aspersions on your relative, but he seemed to quite enjoy it.”

Damian makes an ugly sound in his throat, holding himself tighter. Bruce knows that he would never usually verbally support Tim, unless in dire circumstances, but he also knows that there’s no hatred there. If there ever was any hatred. Arrogance and hurt, insecurities and fear, a little doubt and some begrudging, seething admiration, perhaps. All of that combined created quite a cocktail, an explosive cocktail that seemed to be simmering rather than boiling these days. 

“Unless you want another punch, Poppet, I wouldn’t say much more,” Jason says. There’s an undercurrent of threat in his voice, as there often is, but not enough that Bruce is outright worried. 

Bruce flicks his eyes over to where Jason is. He’s removed himself a little, and he’s leaning against the wall of the Cave, further back, watching the situation unfold. He’s tense, but not to the point of exploding, which likely means he’s noticed all the things that Bruce has noticed. Bruce feels safe enough letting his eyes wander. 

Alfred is pale-faced but stoic, though his eyes seem sad. Stephanie throws herself out of her chair and moves to the shelves near the med-bay, muttering under her breath as she starts sorting out bandages and suture kits with sharp, jerky movements. Cass leaves her to it, staring thoughtfully at the wall. She makes eye-contact with Bruce for a moment, and her nod is sharp, agreeing. Bruce inclines his head back.

“You saw it, plain as anything,” says the man, unaware that most of his audience can see right through him. “The boy’s been in that world too long, it would seem. The images don't lie.”

Perhaps they don't lie, but they don't show the whole truth, either. 

“Nobody asked your opinion, Bob,” Jason grits out, his voice packed with fake-cheer. Losing his patience, fast. 

Bruce is very aware that the man isn’t called Bob. If Zatanna is to be believed, his first name is actually Byron, but nothing else is known about him, barring the fact that he’s not from this world. She only extracted that small snippet of information before he threw up an impenetrable wall of magic around his mind. 

It’s possible that Byron allowed her to have it, his name, but either way, Bruce isn’t inclined to share what he knows just yet. It doesn’t seem relevant, not just yet, and information is power, in Bruce’s opinion. He might need it later. 

“I do wonder if we saw the situation as it was meant to be seen,” Damian ventures, still rigid and unmoving.

“Or perhaps we saw it exactly as it was _meant_ to be seen,” Bruce intones. He turns his head to stare at Byron. Byron’s placid smile doesn’t slip, but the smugness drops from his brow. He shifts a little in his chair, caught and not willing to show it.

“You don't honestly think Tim _killed_ people, do you?” Dick snaps, looking aghast. He bounces on the balls of his feet, a show of restless energy, but his body is tightly wound like a coil, ready to spring. 

Bruce knows that Dick is cleverer than that. All of his children are, and he can only take a very small amount of credit for how they’ve grown and matured, for how their minds have developed, become sharp and as agile as their bodies. Usually he doesn’t think he deserves any credit at all, but he loves them, and he’s selfish enough to want to claim a part of them. 

He knows Dick, perhaps a little better than the rest. He’s a complicated boy - a man now - but easy enough to read. Either Dick is very, _very_ emotional at the moment, which means he isn’t quite thinking beyond the next few minutes and his temper isn’t far from rearing its head, or he’s on the same page as everyone else, and he’s playing it up for their company. 

Bruce knows what they saw in the image. 

What they saw was tombs, dark spaces and skulls on the walls. Dust and dirt and cracked stone. They saw runes on the walls, too, glowing with black light, and those seem infinitely more important. 

What they saw was Tim facing down an army of people, all of whom were somewhat indistinct, as though blurred. Bruce never saw their faces, just the backs of their ragged cloaks as they threw themselves at his son. No noise, just as with the last images, although he wonders if that’s less about magical limitations and more of a tactical decision on behalf of Byron, to not let them hear the context of the situation. It would make sense. 

What they saw was Tim unleashing magic on the small army, and what they saw was the army disintegrating into nothing.

What _Bruce_ saw was the fear and terror, the disgust and revulsion on his sons’ face. The downside of only showing the backs of the so-called victims was that it left the real victim in plain view. And the only reason that Byron might have shown them only half the truth was because showing the faces of the attackers wouldn’t solidify them to his cause. It would put them firmly on Tim’s side. 

Bruce has fought many villains. Some with a looser definition of the word than others. 

This man, Byron, is clever, but not as clever as he thinks he is. His sleight of hand is too obvious, his attempts at subterfuge too clumsy. It’s always possible that it’s simply another layer of his character, and there’s a darker, more amused version of him, even further beneath all of this, but Bruce doesn’t think so. Byron is powerful, even with most of his magic bound, but the only reason he caught them off guard before was because he was an unknown factor. 

He didn't _exist_ before now. Not here in Gotham, not anywhere else in the world. 

It makes sense that he came from the world that Tim resides in now. It makes sense, and yet there’s… there’s something. If he could make a way through, if he could come from that world to this, then why not return? If he doesn’t _want_ to return, then why not? If he wants something else to come through the portal, like his artefact, then why leave it to the hands of others?

And why choose them, of all people?

He doesn’t like not having answers, but at least he’s got one for the moment: the things they’re seeing are based in truth, but not to be trusted. 

Bruce wishes he could say, wholeheartedly, that Tim hadn’t killed those people, if they were even people. He wishes he could believe it, with all his heart, that Tim was innocent, that nobody died, that if someone did die, it was a monster of another land. 

Mostly, he’s sure. There’s still a part of him, the part that compartmentalises problems and poses possible answers as statistics, that isn’t sure. It has to be an option, a possibility, so that it can’t break him later if it’s true. So that he can plan for that event. 

“He didn't kill them,” Dick reiterates. His voice is like stone, but his eyes, when Bruce glances up, are fond and knowing, tinged with exasperation. The words are a gentle reminder, a prod, a nudge. He knows Bruce just as well as Bruce knows him. Bruce doesn't want to think badly of any of his kids. He regrets it, whenever it happens, regardless of whether he was right or not. 

He regrets many things, where Tim is concerned. He regrets keeping him at arms length, regrets letting him go when he should have clung tightly. He regrets that Tim seemed to think his life less important than those of his family, that he went through the portal so that nobody would get the chance to throw him through. He regrets that his expression was so still, so calm, when Tim glanced back at him, just before disappearing. 

“Whatever helps you to sleep at night, I suppose,” Byron says, waving a hand blithely. 

Bruce quirks an eyebrow at Dick, just the barest hint of expression. Dick quirks his mouth back, just the barest hint of a grin. 

“I know what would help you sleep at night, and it isn’t a bedtime story,” Damian snaps, eyeing Byron like he’s examining him for convenient footholds, for later, when he’s going to climb him and break his jaw. Jason chuckles behind them. 

Dick’s grin becomes a full-blown thing, and then drops just as quickly, before Byron can see. The man wants them to break apart, to fight amongst themselves, to mistrust Tim. 

They’re being manipulated, badly, and for the moment, Bruce is going to look fragile and angry, and he's going to let Byron think that he's winning. Bruce isn’t sure _why_ Byron chose their family - perhaps for the abundance of trust issues - but he knows one thing: they’ve let each other down far too often to let the same thing happen again if they can help it, and with Tim missing, all that matters is getting him home. 

He knows one thing. Byron chose wrong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much! Hope you enjoyed it!


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “If I was just magically tattooed by a big door for no good reason, I’m going to be extremely pissed,” Tim says aloud, quite calmly, considering the circumstances.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am about to start building the fuck outta this world. Questions are getting answered very very soon folks!! Thanks for sticking by me!!

Tim rams one Guard in the gut and slams his staff into the back of the others’ head. The second one goes down easily, crumpling like wet paper, but the first lands a punch in his stomach that knocks the breath out of him. He doubles over, panting, as the Guard raises his hand, fist clenched and wrapped in gold, metal gloves. 

Tim ducks to the side when the fist sails towards him again. The Guard stumbles forward. Tim jerks his staff up directly between his legs. The howl that bursts forth is cut off abruptly when Tim slams upward and punches him directly in the face. The clatter of armour as it hits the floor is a sweet, sweet sound. 

He stands, silent for a moment, before the faint noise of the world rushes in. 

“Fuck,” Tim says, breathing hard. _“Fuck._ Were you going to help me, or do you like seeing me bleed too much to get involved?”

Via, sitting primly to the side beside a stack of crates, doesn’t reply. Her eyes hold a wealth of words, but she won’t share them. 

“Right, the silent treatment.” Tim doesn’t roll his eyes, but it’s a close thing. “How could I forget your mature, wise, oh-so-clever decision to stop talking to me?”

The bitter desperation seeps into his tone, soaking his voice. 

Via leaps nimbly over an overturned crate and dips her snout to touch the first Guard’s head. His face is slack, blood pouring out of his nose. Tim grimaces, crouching down to rifle through his pockets. His armour gets in the way, and Tim grimaces again at the noise of metal grinding against the stone floor.

“I need to hide them,” Tim says, glancing around. They’re in an alleyway, wedged between a tavern and a high wall that looks cleaner than everywhere else. He can hear the chatter of crowds just further on, and surely _someone_ must have seen him being chased further back, but nobody’s come looking. The alleyways twisted away from the heart of this place, where the crowds were, but someone could still have followed them. 

He was running and fighting for a good ten minutes, though, and the alleyways are still empty of pursuers. Either they have faith in their guards, or they just don't care. Maybe they know better than to stick their nose into Palace business. 

_Gold will be hard to obscure._

“Oh, are you talking to me now?” Tim can’t hide his relief, even though his words are dry in his mouth. His hands shake. Via trots towards the second Guard, splayed across the floor, and doesn’t respond to his sarcasm. Tim sighs and surveys the knocked-out Guards. She has a point: the armour is a brilliant, shining gold, and stands out starkly against the dirty ground. 

_Use your magic. You do not have to transform the gold. Simply moulding it into something else will do._

Tim lets out a breath, shaking his shoulders loose, and then bends to touch his fingers to bright gold. He works quickly to undo the clasps and hooks, wrestling the Guards out of their armour, leaving them in a tight, plain black uniform. It still takes him a few minutes of grunting and shifting before everything gold is piled up on the ground. 

“I could always wear some of it,” Tim says, staring doubtfully at the heap of armour. 

_It would not fit. You could shrink it, but the plan was not to attract attention, although you’ve done an excellent job of ruining that plan. If you wear this, you will be treated like a Guard until you are discovered. You will be called upon eventually, either to answer summons or to help someone in need. Mould it._

_It’s not my fault that they saw me and my giant wolf sneaking around and decided to ask some questions,_ Tim thinks, sending the thought in Via’s direction. 

Via recoils at the first brush of his voice, snapping her jaws once. Her eyes glint. Tim feels a frisson of fear, like a shock of static, but he doesn’t back down. He sets his jaw and focuses on his staff until it shrinks, growing wand-sized. It’s easier, he’s found, to use it when it’s wand-sized for smaller, more concentrated bouts of magic. It gives the magic a direction, somewhere to go. It feels more like a tool than a weapon. 

He wonders how Dusty knew. 

_Duustrius is a God, whether you remember it or not. A dangerous God who could glimpse many futures, and who will one day rule the darkness. You would do well not to forget._

“Oh, so I can’t think at you, but you can go digging through my mind at will?” Tim grips his staff keenly. “Dusty liked his name. And he’s only going to rule the darkness, or whatever the hell you guys think he’s going to do, if you treat him like shit. If that’s the only thing you expect of him, if that’s what you tell him he is, what he’s going to be, then that’s what you’ll get.” 

Via snorts, disgusted, and looks away, padding to the end of the alleyway to keep watch in the shadows. 

_Morph your gold, child. Do not speak of things you do not understand. We will talk when we reach the Palace._

Her voice fades as she retreats back into herself. Tim feels her loss keenly. It’s like an ache, a bruise that keeps being prodded and poked. He hunches his shoulders and stares down at the pile of gold armour. Via hasn’t spoken with him, not properly, since they left the Tombs of Trachalite, over four days ago. He woke outside, near the river that had unfrozen, as Girl splashed icy water on his face and Via trembled with fury. 

Girl had touched his face when they arrived in Aurumadis her eyes wide and grateful, before settling at the Inn they’d found to sleep in. Coins had been stuffed in the coffins in the Tombs, coins to accompany the Aj’Vin when they passed over. Tim hadn’t felt more than a pinprick of guilt when Girl led him neatly back inside the Tombs, stuffed a handful of the coins into his pockets, and then watched as he gave them to the Innkeeper when they reached Aurumadis. It got Girl a place to sleep for the night, a proper bed. 

The whole time, Via hadn’t said a word. She’d stayed as silent and still as she is now. 

He’s still not sure what he did wrong. He touched the sigils, as he was supposed to. The Ash Language sits, embedded in his staff, just as it was meant to. The Aj’Vin are gone, ended. Dead, he thinks, with a distant, clinical horror. He killed them.

It’s that last fact, and the way he spoke to Via through his mind, that has to be what made her angry. 

If he thinks about it for too long, if he looks too closely at the memories of the Tomb, he’s going to get angry too. 

He can’t undo what he did and, if faced with the option, he’s not sure that he would anyway. The Aj’Vin were unnatural, their lives stretched on too long until they weren’t lives at all. They hurt children, and they were monstrous. There was something else, too: they had an ominous feel to them, as though something deeper was at work. They tainted the world, and Tim feels mostly peaceful at having ended it all, but he knows of many, many people who wouldn’t agree. 

Bruce, in particular, has a no-killing rule. He despises it, loathes it. Tim has always been iron-clad in his support of Bruce’s ideals - he’s not afraid to go against Batman, but for the most part, he doesn’t need to. He agrees. 

Tim grips his staff and breathes out slowly. He can feel Via somewhere behind him, not watching but not ignoring him either. He can also feel her with his mind. She is a cluster of light, just a little ways away. Deep violet light. 

He can feel her rage, her anger, and it’s all directed at him. 

“Gold,” Tim says quietly, squaring his shoulders. “Focus on the gold.”

The armour takes three attempts to mould. He uses his hands in the end, pressing them into the plates of metal until it melts under his burning skin, molten gold liquid shimmering in his palms. He cools his hands gently until he’s holding a heavy metal ball of gold, lumpy and cold to the touch. He has to use two hands just to hold it, and it won’t fit in his pocket, so he warms his fingers again and cleaves the ball in two, shaping it into two smaller spheres of gold.

He pockets them, adjusting to the weight on either side of his jacket, and then shakes his head as he starts hauling the two men over to the other end of the alley. He’s got nothing to tie them up with, but there are handcuffs in one of the Guard’s inside pockets, and he fastens their hands together with a small click, digging around for the key and dropping it into a drain as he passes. 

“They’ll wake up soon,” Tim says, when he reaches Via. “There’s bound to be more guards around, and they’re probably going to have the same reaction to a wolf as those ones did.”

Via bows her head in agreement, but doesn’t look at him. Her voice is distant when she replies. 

_Make your way to the building to the side of the Palace steps, and request the help of a Librarian. You will know what to look for inside. I will reconvene with Girl, and meet you outside when you are done._

“And then?” Tim asks, his voice perfectly level. 

_And then, we shall talk._

*

Nobody stops him on the way to the building that Via mentioned. The streets teem with people, but nobody looks his way, barring a brightly-dressed woman who shouts unintelligible things in his face and eagerly waves some kind of crystal lump at him, hoping to make a sale.

He makes it to the building without being chased by anymore Guards. 

A dog sits at the steps outside, half-asleep, one eye open, watchful. It opens the other when Tim approaches. Black fur, silver eyes, and a lolling tongue. Its tail wags, thumping against the ground when Tim ruffles its fur as he passes. 

He always wanted a dog when he was younger. He’s more of a cat person now, having suffered through Titus’s drooling and shedding. Alfred the Cat is sophisticated and dignified, and a much better lap-companion than Damian’s wilful, dopey dog. 

There are lots of steps to climb, and he does so slowly; Via’s words, heavy and tired, echo around his mind. He’s not sure if he should be worried or not. He’s worried anyway. He likes to think that she won’t abandon him, leave him without a guide or a friend, but he doesn’t know. Perhaps she never considered him a friend in the first place. She’s a Goddess, even if he forgets sometimes. 

Perhaps that’s why she’s angry. Perhaps peering into the mind of a Goddess is an offence, something worth punishing. She can’t send him home because that’s what all this has been for, on the surface, at least. He knows there’s more going on, more behind the scenes, more just out of his reach. 

He doesn’t know the rules of this land, so he’s not sure what’s going to happen. All he knows is that Via wasn’t pleased, and her voice was tired. 

There are Guards about, but they pay Tim no attention, not now that his staff is shrunken and his heels are undogged. He snorts quietly to himself at the internal pun and keeps climbing up the steps to the building. 

The Palace, beside it, resides up a further three hundred steps, each one made of solid gold. The Palace itself is beautiful, even if Tim can’t look at it for too long. The walls of the Palace are gold as well, the towers shining in the light. Magnificent arches and doors glint and beckon further up. Purple flags flutter in the breeze. The sky is grey, but the sun is out full-force. If he turns, he can see the mountains towering over the Kingdom, hidden in the valley, but the snow that frosts the peaks doesn’t come down this far. 

He doesn’t turn. He keeps walking up the slightly more modest steps to the cylindrical building. Not gold, but silver. The building is a small tower, still big enough to comfortably fit a hundred people, but not as intimidating as the spires and turrets behind it. 

The double doors are a dark blue, painted with silver, winking stars. Etched above the door are silver sigils, ones that he doesn’t recognise. 

Via said to request the help of a librarian, so he can reasonably infer that this is a library. He saw Scroll-Keepers near Brickholm, near the Cliff, but there were no libraries. Just sparse shelves and the occasional chest of weathered scrolls. 

He raises a hand to knock, but before he can, the stars on the door begin to melt. Silver paint drips down the doors, coalescing near his hand before he can jerk it back. Tim stares in horror and fascination as the paint squirms around his wrist, forming a thin circlet. He rubs at it frantically with his other hand, but it doesn’t budge. He backs away, but the damage is done.

“What the hell?” Tim says, still digging his fingers into his wrist. 

When the light hits it, the silver circlet shimmers. It doesn’t sting or burn. It feels, more than anything, like part of his skin. He rubs it again, gentler this time.

“If I was just magically tattooed by a big door for no good reason, I’m going to be extremely pissed,” Tim says aloud, quite calmly, considering the circumstances.

When he looks back up, the stars have blinked back into existence on the door, but the circlet remains on his skin, silver and shining. It’s always possible, he thinks, with rising panic and a cautious hope, that it’s not permanent. Maybe it’s just protocol at the library. He’s not going to think about it. 

He’s never wanted a tattoo. Sure, they look cool, and sure, sometimes they look hot, objectively, but he doesn’t want one. He sure as hell doesn’t want this one. 

He inhales deeply, steadying himself, and shoves open the door. 

It’s musty and dark inside, but not the gloom of tombs. It smells of wax and parchment. The wooden floor creaks as he moves, and dust motes fill the air, illuminated by the soft glow of candlelight. The walls are painted an inky black, and there are silver shelves in every available space. Silver shelves full of books and scrolls and small boxes. 

A balcony rings itself around the inside of the room, spiralling up and up in a gentle slope so that the shelves nearer the ceiling are reachable. Tim cranes his neck as the doors slip shut behind him with a quiet snap, but he can’t see the top. For a tower that looked quite small on the outside, it seems impossibly endless now. 

Tim sidles towards a heavy oak desk, near the door, tucked into an alcove. He taps his fingers against the surface, waiting, but there’s nobody there. He can see people around, rustling the pages of various books, but nobody looks _explicitly_ like a librarian. 

He considers just wandering in and yelling for help, but that’s more of a Jason Todd approach, and as much as they get along a little better now, he still doesn’t want to emulate _all_ of Jason’s qualities. Especially not the ones that might get him killed in a strange land. 

Not to mention, Via will be even more pissed if he gets himself captured for disturbing the peace. 

“Don't draw attention,” Tim mutters. “Right. I’ll just do this myself then.”

He tries to look interested as he moves through the room. The books can’t be reached unless he climbs onto the balcony, and he doesn’t particularly want to get to the top and spot help at the bottom and have to sprint back down like an idiot. He follows the inky black walls around instead. Silver stars dot the surface, and here and there sit trails of gold. When he squints a bit closer, he spots the possibilities of pictures in the faint gold swirls. 

Stories, he realises. Stories of the stars. 

Via said he’d know what to look for. Tim thought that was cryptic bullshit and passive-aggressive Goddess speech, but maybe not. He feels something inside, where his soul lives, and it hums and writhes, tugging on his blood. 

He follows the trails of gold. 

They lead him halfway around the cylinder, until he finds a set of steps. The opening is so dark that it blends into the wall, but he ducks, and he finds a corridor, and even in the darkness, he knows where he’s going. 

The circlet on his wrist glows faintly as he walks. There were no protrusions on the outside of the tower, but he appears to be walking _out._

Gold fills the walls now, spears and grazing antelope and fire and rushing waterfalls. 

The corridor opens up into a room. A cluttered, messy room. There’s a desk, several odd lamps that sputter with light, and strange contraptions made of thin wire. If it was Tim’s world, he’d call it someone’s attempt at modern art, but these have a little something else about them.

They aren’t the most noticeable thing, however. Hanging down, there’s a large golden orb suspended in the center of the room. It’s bigger than a fireplace, made of sheer gold. Metal rings rotate around the outside of the orb with a gentle grinding sound. 

Tim skirts around it, unwilling to test his luck and get crushed walking beneath it. Even looking at it causes pressure to build up in his chest, like he’s staring into the heart of something very important. 

He tears his eyes away and keeps walking. 

There’s a map on the far end of the room, taking up one half of the wall. It’s brown and faded, made of thick parchment, but the ink and charcoal on top of it is stark, like it’s been freshly applied. When he reaches it, that’s when the tug in his soul stops. The silver glow fades from his wrist. 

Tim blinks down at his wrist. The circlet is still there, but the glow is gone.

“I can take a hint,” Tim says, and he gathers the nearest box until it’s under the map, steps on it, and starts to look. 

*

The map contains absolutely nothing helpful. He spends roughly thirty minutes pouring obsessively over every little detail, and by the end of it, he’s frustrated and his head is aching, and he’s no closer to whatever he’s supposed to find. 

He’d picked up a spell near the Cliff, back when he first arrived, that let him understand the language of that land, but the people this far North speak in different tongues. He caught snippets of conversation, here and there, when he walked through the streets of the Kingdom and when the guards that chased him shouted out for him to stop. But although he knows _some_ words, he doesn’t understand most of it, and the map is no exception. 

He was lucky that the Niv’Ja and the Aj’Vin spoke words he knew, but even then, their wording was a little stilted. 

“Different dialects,” Tim murmurs, tapping his fingers against the silver circlet. “Different languages, overlapping. I know some of it, when it’s similar enough to the language from the Cliff, but hardly any of the rest of it. And there’s more out there, I expect. This… This is a whole world.”

His exclamation takes on a soft, awed tinge. He’s known, the whole time, that wherever he’d landed obviously wasn’t anywhere on Earth. Perhaps not even on a few of the closest surrounding planets, which Clark has some way to keep tabs on. It was unlikely that Dave the Villain would have needed outside help if his artefact was somewhere on Earth, and Clark said that the closest surrounding planets, the ones with life on, were mostly peaceful. 

He had known that he was somewhere else. Possibly somewhere far out in the universe, unreachable. Possibly in another universe altogether, an alternate one. None of this is new information, and _yet._

Somehow, seeing each intricate line on the map, seeing the borders and villages and regions and cities and kingdoms, makes it all that more real. This is a whole world that he’s fallen into. There are rules here, religions, history, cultures that overlap. Societies have been created over thousands of years. Wars have been fought, battles lost, milestones reached. Beautiful things have been invented and destroyed. People have been buried, monsters birthed, and magic bathes every inch of the land. 

He leans against the wall, one hand braced against the map, and tries to push down a sob that claws its way up his throat. 

It brings it home, that he’s not home. 

He sucks in harsh breaths and traces the delicate ridge of the Mountains of Narvjinia, the home of the Healers, with a trembling finger. He knows that word, Narvjinia, saw it on the pillars in the Temples, heard it whispered from the mouths of the Niv’Ja. A little grey sketch that looks like a bundle of pillars is nestled in the middle of the mountain range. The pillars remove slowly, bobbing as they turn, but Tim thinks they’re supposed to be the Temple. A miniature skull rests at the bottom of the mountain, it’s mouth opening and closing in a laugh. The peaks rise and fall, as does the sketched snow that hovers above the mountain ridge on the map. The pictures undulate, rippling softly, an image caught in a loop for a few seconds. 

The line of the mountain ridge falls, naturally, to the small Kingdom of Aurumadis. Names, it seems, he can understand easily enough. Nothing else makes much sense. 

Brickholm is there, if he goes further South. The village is tiny, and there are birds sketched onto the surface of the map, flying gently over the clusters of houses, never getting very far. He doesn’t remember seeing many birds, but he’d been looking for answers, not wildlife. If he goes to the North-West, away from Aurumadis, he finds a steep line. Not quite a mountain. 

Above it, a grey dragon sleeps, plumes of charcoal smoke filling the sky. 

Behind him, the orb grinds to a stop, plunging the room into silence. 

Tim whips around and ducks towards the other desk, intent on diving beneath it, but it’s too late. There’s a woman there, startled, staring at him. She’s cloaked in velvet blue, the hood pulled up over her white curls. A silver net covers her eyes, a veil of sorts, but the netting doesn’t hide her expression. 

“Who are you?” Tim asks. He didn't hear her. He’s always been the one to sneak up on others, rather than the other way around. Bruce taught him how to move like the night, creeping and enveloping, light on his feet and deadly for it. 

The woman hisses, a soft susurration of curious sounds that send a shudder down Tim’s spine. His grimace brings her up short. She takes a step back, her face apologetic. 

“I’m sorry if I’m trespassing,” Tim says, trying again. “But who are you?” 

His fingers itch to reach for his staff, but he keeps them still. The woman isn’t a threat, not yet, and technically, she may have more right to be here than him. If she starts launching fireballs at him, then he’ll worry. 

The woman clucks her tongue for a moment, and then she speaks. 

“You are lost,” she says, in Tim’s tongue. Not English, but the one he learned before he came to Brickholm. “I am Lady Luna, the Second. I am the Librarian, the Observer, and I own the Cylinder.”

Tim jolts, and then cautiously unwinds his hands where they grip the desk. 

“Not many people are capable of finding the Corridor of the Celestials,” Lady Luna continues. “Not many people will willingly stroke a hellhound, either, and yet you somehow did both in the span of a few minutes.”

Tim’s eyes flick to the dark space behind her. “In fairness, I didn't know it was a special corridor when I walked down it. I also didn't know that was a hellhound outside.”

Lady Luna tips her head slightly, her eyes twinkling. “I think that knowing would not have changed your decisions.”

“People keep accusing me of similar things lately,” Tim says, his voice light as he edges around the room. 

“I will not harm you, Drake,” says Lady Luna, sounding firmly amused as she watches him move. 

Tim stiffens at the use of his last name, hand flying to his staff, but her next words draw him up short. 

“That would be counterproductive, considering I, and the rest of my world, have waited a long, long time for you to arrive.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much!! Throwing lore and awesomeness at you next time! 
> 
> Oh, if anyone had an unrelated Batfam Christmas prompt, I’m all ears! Doesn’t have to be the whole Batfam! Can just be one or two! 
> 
> Thanks again, let me know what you thought! <3


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s tempting to accept. Not just because it's not every day that some kind of Goddess offers you coffee.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoops, hi! I don't know if this gives you more questions than answers, but I promise it'll make sense soon. There's lots of clues here! Apologies for the long wait. Don't ask me exactly when I'll return, because honestly I haven't got a clue, but I appreciate all the comments and kudos and I love all of you for saying nice things even though I'm off on another world. I am starting the next chapter tonight though, so there's that! Ta, lovelies!

On Earth, coffee kept Tim alive. It was the only thing that allowed him to function after nights of endless patrols, cases piling up around him, the stress of keeping WE afloat and dodging random Ninja attacks. His hands shook and his pulse was always quicker than he’d like it to be, but coffee kept his mind sharp and staved off collapse when sleepless nights crowded in. 

The first two weeks in this place that wasn’t Earth—although Tim hadn’t quite believed it then, had thought that perhaps there were other alternatives than being stranded on a different planet—without coffee were hell. He had the worst headache of his life, he found himself snapping when he should be coaxing information out of potential allies, and he could barely breathe around the fast, insistent beat of his heart. It was actually harder to sleep, without coffee. 

He would have given his right leg for one glorious mug of coffee, when he first arrived.

Lady Luna lifts a cylindrical pot made of glass and pours a thin stream of dark, hot coffee into a shallow cup. Tim can smell it, the roasted beans and the bitterness tempered by sweet cream that sits in a jug just out of reach. He has to fold his hands tightly in his lap to keep from reaching out. If he reaches out, he’s not going to stop until he’s drunk every last drop of coffee in this place.

“Help yourself,” Lady Luna offers, gesturing gracefully with her gloved hand. More shallow cups appear on the table, each one more akin to a bowl than a mug and patterned with curls of midnight blue. One shifts closer to Tim as though pushed by a gentle, invisible hand, and remains there, waiting patiently. 

It’s tempting to accept. Not just because it's not every day that some kind of Goddess offers you coffee. Tim can think of nothing better than hot, sweet coffee. Not just because it would taste amazing, and would probably kick-start his brain into figuring out a thousand solutions to problems he didn't even know he had, but also because it’s the first thing he’s found that connects so deeply with home. But if he reaches out, and he drinks coffee, and he grows sharper and quicker, and then it’s taken away again—well, Tim just doesn’t think it would be a very good idea. At least not for the people around him. 

“So can you make anything appear, or was coffee already around and I just couldn’t find it?” Tim asks, leaning forward slightly in the chair he found himself in a few minutes ago. He’s tried standing, and he can’t, so leaning seems to be the limit. “Is it conjuring or summoning? If you don't mind me asking.”

It’s the least of his questions, but considering a few minutes ago he was standing near a map in the middle of a library, an orb hanging from mid-air above him, and now he’s sat at a round table in a glass room, unable to stand, he figures it’s best to start with something simple. And perhaps get an idea of the limits to Lady Luna’s power along the way.

“Neither,” Lady Luna says simply. She lifts her cup and drinks from it, savouring the taste with a thoughtful hum. “Hmm. I’ll admit, that’s not what I expected. It’s much less kind on the tongue.”

Tim narrows his eyes, leaning back on the delicately-wrought chair. He must have hit his head at some point, or perhaps this whole thing has just been a really long, tiring, annoying hallucination. Maybe he’s at the Manor, struggling to wake up from a dose of fear gas gone wrong, or some kind of altered pollen, courtesy of Ivy. Maybe he’ll wake any minute now, once Bruce administers the antidote, and be greeted with Dick’s hugs, Jason’s brash brand of comfort, Damian’s scathing retorts and an Alfred sandwich. Steph will have his favourite yogurt and Cheezits waiting, and Cass will hold him carefully. 

Maybe Tim shouldn’t think such things, if he wants to stay sane. 

Lady Luna sighs, smacking her lips gently as she puts her cup back down. “You must have more questions.”

“Are you going to actually answer these ones?” 

“Oh, a few, I imagine.” She sounds disinterested, her voice airy and light, but something about the way she keeps so still betrays her fascination. 

“Fantastic,” Tim mutters. He drums his fingers against his leg before stilling. When he glances down, his clothes are different, and he can’t believe it took him more than five minutes to notice. Bruce would be disappointed. He glances sharply at Lady Luna and says, “I wasn’t wearing this before.”

His clothes from before were somewhat ragged. He had lost the clothes he had on when he went through the portal, lost them to animal attacks and dirt and filth and blood. It still stings, losing Dick’s old shirt, the one he’d been wearing when he burst through a door of blue. He had been dressed several times over since then in loose, comfortable clothes, robes and tunics that didn't quite fit, trousers that were too short or itchy. All of it old, passed down, given him to by Baron or the Niv’Ja—or stolen, he remembers, thinking of Catus with some fondness—and all of it close to unravelling, falling apart thread by thread. 

These clothes feel new. His cotton trousers are thicker than before, dyed an earthy shade of brown. Pockets travel down his thighs, and there are loops for a belt around the waistband. His boots are dark and moulded perfectly to his feet, the laces tied neatly. Socks cushion his sore feet. He’s wearing a tunic that sits comfortably around his body. It’s a shade darker than Nightwing blue, with a black belt around the middle and a warm, black jacket. 

“How am I wearing this?” Tim asks, plucking at the jacket. 

“Do not worry,” Lady Luna says in a voice that echoes, peeling off the netting over her eyes, “I did not peek.”

Tim sucks in an inaudible breath, careful to keep still. He peers at her, just barely hiding his surprise. The netting was just that—netting, hiding almost nothing, and yet apparently it hid much more than it pretended to. She looks so different without it. Somehow, even that thin shard of fabric had obscured her true face. 

Her white curls are soft, tendrils of moonlit hair curving around her oval face. Her eyes shine like stars. There are silver marks all over her deep, dark skin, like the gold whirls on the walls of the Library. He can’t make out any specific pictures, but they seem to glow like his circlet. 

He rubs at his new tattoo, which hasn’t shone since it first stopped, back in the library. He can’t settle on a question of importance, so he asks, “What do they mean? Your marks?”

The silver marks travel down Lady Luna’s hands, visible when she eases off her white gloves. She holds one hand up to the light, her mouth a wistful curve as she rotates it gently. There’s plenty of light to see by. The walls and the roof surrounding them are all made of glass, and through it Tim can see nothing but the sky, a vision of bright, bright, endless blue, almost as though they’re an island in the middle of the sea. Thin mist hovers around the triangular room, perched high in the abyss, but there’s still light enough to make the marks glint. 

“These marks are the only way to keep track of history these days.” Lady Luna lowers her hand slowly, cupping it with the other as her voice turns soft. “When you build a world, generally you begin small. Just a few things here and there, you know. A landscape, a beautiful deadly flower, an ant with wings.”

A seed of fear takes root in Tim’s stomach. _When you build a world._

Lady Luna sighs, shaking her head as she rubs one thumb over a mark on the back of her hand. It seems a shade darker than the rest, a shape made of three points. 

“Of course, it never stays that way. Things grow, and with it, the element of control begins to shrink. No matter how many worlds I have created, I never seem to learn.”

Tim shudders. He feels the same way he did when Dusty lifted him from the ground, encased him in a fist of ash and held him to his mournful, cracked face, full of aching fire. It feels like staring into the mouth of the universe, only a thousand times worse, a thousand times more powerful, more terrifying. 

Bats do not feel fear. Birds have to, sometimes, because Bats refuse to cave. They don't listen to the sensible mutterings of their stomach and soul, telling them that this way of living isn’t safe, that fear is healthy, that you must look before you leap. 

Bruce is meticulous is his planning, ruthless and careful, but even if the driving force behind it is arguably fear, he doesn’t feel it anymore. Not when he is the Bat. That’s what the birds are for. That’s why Batman needs a Robin; not just to play light to his darkness, but to remind him that fear is necessary, that in its absence, nothing good can grow. 

Tim has never felt fear quite like this. It’s a shuddering thing that tells him not to bother existing, because existence is something to be decided by the very being in front of him. 

Lady Luna’s eyes, Tim realises, could very well be stars after all. 

“It is easier to remember with my companions around, but they were absent this time, and there was nothing to stop me from creating what I desired,” Lady Luna continues, seemingly oblivious to the weight crushing Tim’s soul. “But from the minute I painted the first intelligent, thinking mind into my canvas, the pictures began to run away from me. Sometimes quite literally.” She looks up at him, a wry glint to her eyes. “Humans are the worst of creation, in my opinion. You are cruel, vicious, and unthinking. But you have the capacity to be so _beautiful,_ if you would only choose such a route. The burden of free will, I suppose, is that often you choose wrong.”

She sounds sad, beneath her semi-nonsensical rambling. Tim isn’t sure that he understands all of it, and quite frankly, he’s not sure that he wants to. But he gets the gist. It’s not a gist he likes. He’d rather give it back, if he’s honest, because it implies that he’s sitting in the presence of a being that created _the very world beneath his feet._

“But you asked about my marks, originally. As societies began to grow and form, as things began to change and evolve, I decided I may as well keep track of it the only way I know how. It came from me, you see, so I decided to keep it with me.” Lady Luna spreads her hands. On her left palm, a mark begins to glow brighter than the rest, brought to attention. 

“Do you see this circle? Goodness, I hate circles. They seem so harmonious, but the balance is false. It is one perspective, acting for the good of all, pretending to know best. Ridiculous shape. That’s why I used it as this mark. This circle is one hundred years of strife in the Western region of this world, one hundred years of famine, death, plague and suffering.” Her eyes flicker as though she’s watching it, a reel of film, the past brought briefly to the present. “A horrible time, really. And quite boring.”

Tim chokes back a terrible sound, beginning to grind his teeth. Once again, rage cools his fear. “A hundred years of suffering is boring?” 

Tim doesn’t have his staff. Lady Luna didn't see fit to bring any of his belongings with him into this place, wherever they are. He’s not sure he could do much even if he did, but the fact remains that he wants it in his cold hands, wants to clench his stiff fists around it and feel like he could fight her if need be. 

Not that Tim needs a weapon to be deadly. But with Lady Luna, he feels as though he needs every possible edge he can get his hands on. 

“Nothing happened. Everyone was so predictable.” Lady Luna waves a hand. “You cannot learn anything new if you’re stuck watching the same day over and over. That’s the horror of a circle, you see. The people began to stagnate, and so a hundred years were wasted, and I learned nothing. That is my definition of boring, not _learning_ anything.” A silence descends in which Tim steadies his breathing, and Lady Luna takes a sip of coffee before lacing her hands in front of her, watching him keenly. “In any case, that’s not the sort of question I thought you’d ask.”

Tim keeps silent. He has a thousand questions, a thousand answers that escape him at the moment. He wants to know exactly who this woman is, and if there are any more people like her. He wants to know more about the marks. He wants to know why she seems so passionate about shapes, of all things, and where she got coffee from. He wants to know where they are, in this glass room so high up in the sky that the rest of the world is invisible. He wants to know why he has a tattoo that looks almost like her marks, why she was hidden away in the library, and what the hell he is supposed to do next. 

He wants to know if she, with all her infinite power and wisdom, can send him home. 

“Do you know who I am?” Tim asks, instead of all those things. “When you found me in your room, you said that you’d been waiting a long time for me. You and this world, the one you apparently created. So you must know who I am.”

“I don't know about ‘must’ but yes, I know who you are, Drake.”

“You know my last name.” It’s nothing more than a statement of fact, really. But there’s something there, something hidden beneath cryptic words that needs digging up. “You’re not the first to know it. The Aj’Vin knew my last name too. They called me a little bird.”

He tilts his head. Lady Luna stares back solemnly. 

“If you know who I am, then you must know where I came from,” Tim presses, careful to keep his voice soft even though the urgency shines through. 

“I do,” Lady Luna says, and for the first time she sounds sympathetic, as though she feels for him. “And I cannot give you what you require. I cannot interfere, Drake. I am already doing too much, just by speaking with you now.” 

Tim swallows. “I just need a way home.”

Lady Luna shakes her head very gently, a movement that is barely there. “If you find one, it will not be because of me.”

Tim takes a moment to digest that. It takes longer than he’d like, precious seconds slipping by as he sits rigidly, tempted to down every last drop of coffee on the table and then smash the glass pot. The threat of a headache is what keeps the first urge at bay, and the threat of the glass floor shattering too holds the second urge back. But it’s still crushing, to hear it. He swallows thickly again, feeling a vice around his heart squeeze tightly. 

“It really is a beautiful day,” Lady Luna says, sighing as she stares at the window. Tim doesn’t know if she’s giving him time, or if she’s simply insane. Or perhaps those that exist the way she does have a different version of sanity.

“How did they know about me?” Tim asks abruptly, clinging to another question. “The Aj’Vin.”

Lady Luna waves her hand, dispelling her cup and saucer. In its place, a creamy cupcake takes its place, dotted with pink curls and white icing. Steph had some like that on her birthday, a while ago. Tim tries not to look.

“I told you that people are the worst creations of all,” Lady Luna says, after a moment, unpeeling her cupcake wrapper carefully. “They are tricky to get right. The Aj’Vin were not really people by the end, but they come close enough that the label still applies. When they were kinder and younger, they were the Niv’Ja, and the information they had was used for good. But after, as they decayed and rotted in their rooted caves, they began to relish the thought of what they could do with that information.”

Tim listens intently. Lady Luna takes a bite of her cupcake and screws up her nose delicately. She swallows without chewing and sighs. 

“It’s all the free will, you see,” she says blithely. “No matter what I create, if it has a thinking mind, then it must be allowed to act without my say-so. I can drop a boulder in the middle of a path that was not there the previous night to divert the route of the traveller, but I cannot control how the traveller will react to the boulder. Do they turn back? Do they climb over it, or dig beneath it? Do they blast it to smithereens with magic they ought not to have, or have only just discovered? Are they helped by other travellers?” Lady Luna makes a sound of soft disgust. “Variables. So many of them. It makes it hard to predict the way the world will progress. Ordinarily, that is something I strive for, but at times like these, I find it simply frustrating.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Tim says, even though he sort of does. “Just so you know.”

Lady Luna sighs, steepling her fingers. “Years ago, perhaps two thousand or so, my sister and I created a prophecy on a whim. We were bored, you see. Our suitors had bothered us all day, and we finally found a quiet spot in the cosmos to rest, only to be struck down by boredom of all things. She taunted me with her lyrical prowess, and I simply had to respond with a touch of drama. It’s not usually my style, but there we have it. A Prophecy was born.”

Tim can feel his left eye twitching. Suitors, prophecies, and sisters. Fuck, he has a headache. 

“Prophecies aren’t much good for entertainment on their own, so a while later, after I created this world and the Gods that rule it, I plopped the Prophecy in their lap.” Lady Luna shrugs elegantly. “From then on, it was their decisions that ruled how it would be viewed, how seriously it would be taken.”

“And what decisions did they make?” Tim asks, quite certain that he doesn’t want to know the answer. 

“Oh, this and that, you know how such things can be,” Lady Luna replies vaguely, flapping a dismissive hand. “Gods can get in such a tizzy over the smallest things. Goddesses are a little better at keeping their heads on straight, and those that don't confirm to labels at all tend to be the most level-headed of the bunch, in all honesty. But there was a great big hullabaloo regardless. Quite entertaining.”

Tim pictures her sat, cross-legged, with popcorn, watching the chaos of the Gods. Like Jason whenever he lobs an emotional bombshell into a room at the Manor and sits back to watch the arguments unfold. It calms him very briefly, and then the twitch in his eye comes back. 

“So there was a Prophecy that you created, with your sister, who I assume you’re not going to tell me about,” Tim says, pausing in case she wants to prove him wrong. She smiles mysteriously, and he barrels onward. “You gave the Prophecy to the Gods of this world, thus thoroughly fucking them all over, and they did something with it.”

“Incorrect.” Lady Luna fixes him with a piercing, starlit stare. “Gracious, Drake, do not give me more credit than I am due. The Prophecy would have been nothing more than a passage of excellently constructed literature had they only decided it was meaningless. It was their choice to interpret more from it. When the word spread to the humans—Gods are notorious gossips—it simply amplified the belief that it was true.”

“So it might not be true?”

Lady Luna spreads her hands, an indulgent lilt to her mouth. “That depends on what you choose to believe, of course.”

Tim _chooses to believe_ that this is all bullshit. But he doesn’t say that aloud. 

“I don't even know what this Prophecy is,” Tim says, frustration coursing through him. “But I’m going to take a wild guess and say that I’m in it. And the Aj’Vin must have found out about it when they were the Niv’Ja, after the Prophecy was… released to the public. And recognised me later on when I charged into their little lair.”

“If that was your wild guess, then what does your tame, controlled guess usually lead to?” Lady Luna muses.

Tim shrugs. “Grappling across the city in spandex, usually.”

Lady Luna opens her mouth to reply, but then her gaze drifts suddenly to a point just over Tim’s shoulder. She nods sharply. Tim tries to turn his head, but his neck won’t cooperate. He’s forced to watch, instead, as she smiles at him, all sweetness. “How sad. I was quite enjoying our time together, but it seems that all good things must come to an end, even in a Being’s dreams. Would you like to take some coffee with you when you leave?”

Panic surges through him, and right on the heels of that is incredulity—this is a _dream,_ she said, a Being’s dream, which explains the clothes and the lack of movement—followed quickly by a cold shiver of fear at the back of his spine. 

“I have more questions,” Tim says, but even as he speaks, he knows he won’t get anything else out of her. She already looks dimmer than before, her eyes less bright. “I don't even know why I was supposed to meet you. Why did Via send me to you? Do you know each other?” 

Lady Luna laughs gently. It is a sound like a thousand shimmering jewels shattering against the ground. Around them, the glass begins to break, cracks spider-webbing out from every corner. 

“Drake, I created Via. I created her to be the Goddess of the Travellers, the Guide to those who are lost. And she did an excellent job.”

“I don't know what that means,” Tim snaps, rigid in his chair as the ceiling begins to fall. “You were supposed to help me!”

“You will, and I did,” Lady Luna says, a mix of sad and amused. “And I must thank you, Drake. I didn't care for the cake, but I rarely have such pleasant dreams as this. I could not have done it without you.”

The glass shatters, and the bottom drops out of Tim’s stomach as he lurches downwards, the ground vanishing. The dream fades.

When Tim snaps his eyes open, Lady Luna and the dream room is gone, but the sickening lurching feeling in his stomach is still there—as is the bright blue sky, rising up all around him as he falls, faster and faster, breathless and terrified, towards a glimmering ocean of gold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, if you got this far! I may edit/clean up a few of the chapters in the next few days, but I never change the details etc, just fix grammar or timelines. Thanks again for keeping the comments going, they are the best kind of food and I love all of you! Let me know what you thought!

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you! Comments fuel me, as do kudos, and I'd love to know what you think. Thank you so much!


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